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enGender, Environment, and Imperialism in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albionhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2001-11-01T00:00:00-05:00">November 2001</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/ecology/index.html">Romanticism and Ecology</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
<h2 style="text-align: center">Romanticism &amp; Ecology</h2>
<h3 style="text-align: center">Gender, Environment, and Imperialism in William Blake's <i>Visions of the Daughters of Albion<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#*">*</a></sup></i></h3>
<h4 style="text-align: center">Kevin Hutchings, University of Northern British Columbia</h4>
<p><i>Important note: This essay contains hypertext links to The William Blake Archive. Please read the conditions of access listed on the <a href="http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/blake/"><i>Archive's</i> Welcome Page</a></i> before <i>using the links provided below.</i></p>
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<p>As numerous critics have noted in passing, William Blake's <i>Visions of the Daughters of Albion</i> (1793) explicitly correlates Bromion's brutal appropriation and rape of Oothoon's body with a figurative but no less violent "rape" of the natural world.<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#1">1</a></sup> It is this correlation and some of its philosophical implications that I will examine here in detail; for, somewhat like Albion in Blake's late prophecies, Oothoon represents in <i>Visions</i> both a person and a landscape, and nothing can happen to her human portion that does not also affect the environmental aspect of her identity. Hence, while <i>Visions</i> deals primarily with the issue of human slavery (in its related patriarchal and colonial contexts), it is also very much concerned with the parallel conquest and "enslavement" of nature, the methodical extension of what the Baconian philosopher Joseph Glanville was pleased to call, in his <i>Plus Ultra</i> of 1668, "the <i>Empire</i> of <i>Man</i> over <i>inferior</i> Creatures" (188).<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#2">2</a></sup></p>
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<p>At the opening of <i>Visions</i>, we abruptly learn that the "ENSLAV'D ... Daughters of Albion" send "sighs toward America," and that the woeful Oothoon similarly longs for America's "soft soul" (1:1-3).<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#3">3</a></sup> Clearly, what these enslaved characters long for is political emancipation, the opportunity to live according to the libertarian ideals commonly associated with the American Revolution. What is less apparent is the geo-generic aspect of <i>Visions</i>' references to America: the characters' implicit understanding of America as an idyllic pastoral retreat. Historically, as Leo Marx has noted, the age of discovery introduced into the Arcadian myth "a note of topographical realism," and, from the Elizabethan era until the late nineteenth century, Europeans tended to view America in Arcadian terms as a vast and unspoiled garden of "'incredible abundance'" (Marx 47, 37-40).<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#4">4</a></sup> From such an idealizing standpoint, the New World becomes a truly green and pleasant land, a pristine space wherein political freedom is supported in part by nature's Edenic plenitude.</p>
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<p>At the time that Blake wrote and engraved <i>Visions</i>, however, America was hardly as free and gentle as such idealism would have it. On the contrary, as <i>Visions</i> emphatically demonstrates, America's pastoral image helped to disguise the fact that much of its colonial prosperity depended upon slavery and the relentless expropriation of Indigenous lands. If, as numerous critics have argued, Oothoon's plight in <i>Visions</i> allegorizes not only the condition of British women under the yoke of patriarchy but also the plight of the New World's enslaved blacks and oppressed Native Americans,<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#5">5</a></sup> she is also at one level of Blake's allegory the indivisible body and "soul of America" itself, a vital "continent longing ... to be cultivated by free men, not slaves or slave drivers" (Erdman, <i>Prophet</i> 227). Hence, when Bromion rapes Oothoon, he violates and expropriates both her human portion <i>and</i> its related environmental aspect. Such violence is implicit in Bromion's arrogant post-rape address to Oothoon:</p>
<blockquote>Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north &amp; south:<br/>
Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun:<br/>
They are obedient, they resist not[.]<br/>
(1:20-22)</blockquote>
<p>Since the eighteenth century, the word "rape" has often been used to describe human acts of environmental plunder and destruction,<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#6">6</a></sup> a terminological employment that suggests, as ecofeminist writer Susan Griffin observes, "a profound connection between the social construction of nature and the social construction of woman" (225). While Blake never directly employs the word "rape" in <i>Visions</i>, he could not have been oblivious to the Enlightenment rhetoric that described scientific inquiry&#8212;which Bacon believed would restore humanity to its originary position of "empire" over nature&#8212;as a "penetration" of nature's "womb" (<i>Novum Organum</i> 114, 50, 100).<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#7">7</a></sup> In <i>Visions</i>, however, Blake further complicates this equation of sexual and environmental violence by considering it in light of a colonialist racism that enslaves non-Europeans, forcing them to become the very instruments of environmental subjugation in the New World. Thus, when Bromion brags of his slaves that "They are obedient, they resist not," his grammatically ambiguous plural pronouns can be seen to gesture not only toward the antecedent "swarthy children of the sun" but also toward the "soft" or pliable landscapes he expropriates in the previous line. Clearly, Bromion sees his mastery of humans and landscapes as roughly equivalent: both, he suggests, offer themselves <i>willingly</i> to his authority. Given the overt violence of his imperialist rapacity, however, we must see in Bromion's self-aggrandizing myth of total mastery an underlying element of fear and paranoia; for, to revisit Griffin's discussion of rape in its sexual and environmental significations, "why does one have to conquer what is not challenging, fearsome, and in some way, wild, falling as it does outside the idea of mastery and control?" (225). Undoubtedly, Bromion's rape of Oothoon involves a complex and multifaceted act of sexual, cultural, and environmental conquest.</p>
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<p>In order to stabilize his overarching authority over Oothoon, Bromion resorts to the age-old practice of stereotyping, accusing Oothoon of "harlot[ry]" (1:18, 2:1). As an exercise of power, this stereotyping has complex and ambivalent implications; but its immediate consequences are dire. First of all, we must recall that, traditionally, "women called whores or who are prostitutes are not 'protected' by other men from rape" (Griffin 224); hence, by depicting Oothoon as a harlot, Bromion, her rapist, effectively robs her of recourse to protective justice. Second, Bromion's stereotyping encourages Theotormon to reject Oothoon's freely proffered love as a manifestation of harlotry and "defilement," a rejection that drives her almost to despair. Subsequently, Oothoon proceeds to defend herself from the accusation of "impurity" by marshalling numerous rhetorically powerful arguments from nature; but, as readers have often noted, this strategy of argumentation is decidedly perilous. In attempting to prove her moral and sexual purity by way of reference to the world of nature, Oothoon seems unaware, among other things, that contemporary thinkers often accused Dame Nature herself of harlotry.<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#8">8</a></sup></p>
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<p>While Bromion's deployment of the harlot stereotype helps him to consolidate his brutal authority over Oothoon's body (in both its human and terrestrial aspects), his stereotyping also inadvertently demonstrates the discursive ambivalence of his position as an agent of patriarchy and imperialism in <i>Visions</i>. As Homi K. Bhabha has argued, the stereotype, as a structure of predication, is fraught with contradiction: on the one hand, it is supposed to articulate a naturalized, self-evident truth, something that "goes without saying"; and yet, the fact that the stereotype depends upon continual reiteration (as in Bromion's repeated reference to Oothoon's harlotry) suggests that its authority is always less than comfortably stable. Hence, in a discussion that is highly relevant to the sexual/colonial allegory of <i>Visions</i>, Bhabha remarks that "the stereotype . . . is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always 'in place,' already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated," as if the ostensibly self-evident truths it attests to "can never really, in discourse, be proved" (66).</p>
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<p>An illuminating contemporary instance of the ambivalence of colonialist stereotyping can be found in what critics widely acknowledge as one of the major textual sources for <i>Visions</i>, Captain John Gabriel Stedman's <i>Narrative of a Five Years Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam</i> (1796), for which Blake engraved approximately fourteen illustrations just prior to composing and etching <i>Visions</i>.<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#9">9</a></sup> In a discussion of Surinamese sexual practice, Stedman touches upon many of the sexual concerns and issues Blake addresses in <i>Visions</i>: false modesty, chastity, adultery, harlotry, and the uninhibited gratification of sexual desire. Although in the unpublished version of <i>Narrative</i> Stedman privately fears that his observations "will be highly censured by the Sedate European Matrons" (1790; 47), he nevertheless candidly remarks, in a published passage worth quoting at length, that in colonial Surinam most European men acquire female slave-mistresses. These women, Stedman claims,</p>
<blockquote>all exult in the circumstance of living with an European, whom in general they serve with the utmost tenderness and fidelity, and tacitly reprove those numerous <i>fair-ones</i> who break through ties more sacred and solemn. Young women of this depiction cannot indeed be married . . . as most of them are born or trained up in a state of slavery; and so little is this practice condemned, that while they continue faithful and constant to the partner by whom they are chosen, they are countenanced and encouraged by their nearest relations and friends, who call this a lawful marriage, nay, even the clergy avail themselves of this custom without restraint. . . . Many of the sable-coloured beauties will however follow their own <i>penchant</i> without any restraint whatever, refusing with contempt the golden bribes of some, while on others they bestow their favours for a dram or a broken tobacco-pipe, if not for nothing. (1796; 1.25-26)</blockquote>
<p>Based on the evidence offered in <i>Visions</i>, one might speculate that Blake would have perused this passage (if he had in fact read Stedman's text<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#10">10</a></sup>) with a certain amount of qualified admiration and approval. Just as the enslaved Oothoon roundly condemns the "subtil modesty" of the "modest virgin knowing to dissemble / With nets found under thy night pillow, to catch virgin joy, / And brand it with the name of whore" (6:7, 10-12), Stedman subtly condemns the hypocrisy of the many "<i>fair-ones</i>" of Europe whose pretended feminine modesty, his italics more than hint, is at odds with their actual sexual desires and practices. Indeed, by "follow[ing] their own [sexual] <i>penchant</i> without any restraint whatever," the "sable-coloured beauties" of Stedman's narrative behave very much like Blake's Oothoon, who actively and unashamedly seeks sexual gratification with Theotormon, one of her colonialist oppressors. A glance at the unpublished version of Stedman's text is even more revealing. Here, just as Oothoon indicts "hypocrite modesty" (6:16)&#8212;and not the active pursuit of sexual desire&#8212;as the true model of "selfish" harlotry (6:16-20), Stedman's slave-women do "not hesitate . . . to pronounce as Harlots" those who refuse to follow the "laudable Example" of a sexuality that seeks unrestrained gratification (1790; 48).</p>
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<p>But when Stedman concludes the unpublished version of his panegyric to the sexuality of Surinamese slave-mistresses by calling these women "the disinterested Daughters of pure Nature" (1790; 48), he reveals the philosophical subtext supporting his heavily revised published argument, invoking in the process the kind of idealistic primitivism that greatly troubled and often offended Blake. Not only does such idealism efface the historical actuality of the female slaves' parentage (since these women are "mostly . . . creole" [1790; 47], they are primarily the daughters not of nature but of female African slaves and male European slave-masters like Bromion); by invoking the concept of "pure Nature" (and thus the various nature/culture dualisms that the concept tended to carry in the late eighteenth century), Stedman's ethnographic discourse on sexuality implicitly supports age-old stereotypes associating women and black people with corporeality rather than spirit, emotion rather than reason, licentiousness rather than license. Finally, it is important to note the generic influences on Stedman's sexual ethnography, for in its implicit tendency to locate corruption in the colonial metropolis and "purity" or freedom in the green world of Surinam, Stedman's discussion partakes of the apparent dichotomy of the pastoral idyll, which, by distinguishing country from city (and, by extension, nature from culture), tends often to efface the ideological practices inevitably constituting our views of the "natural" world.</p>
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<p>Certainly Oothoon finds it impossible in <i>Visions</i> to convince her beloved Theotormon that the physical body&#8212;or the natural world of which it is a material part&#8212;can be "pure." In stark contrast to Bromion (who represents the overtly sensual, gluttonously appetitive, and perversely self-gratifying aspect of European colonialism), Theotormon is grimly ascetic,<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#11">11</a></sup> his moralizings aligning him in <i>Visions</i>' colonial allegory with a self-righteous and hypocritical imperialist evangelism. His distance from all things deemed natural and his obsession with a distant, disengaged, and otherworldly sky-God are implicit in his very name (whose roots, <i>theos</i> and <i>thereos</i>, mean "God" and "spectator" respectively [Hoerner 132]). A devoted follower of the <i>via negativa</i>, the "negative way" of ascetic consciousness, Theotormon believes he must deny all things earthly, including especially the "natural" impulses comprising his sensual aspect, in order to achieve his ultimate goal of union with a "wholly other" God. Theotormon's ascetic disavowal of corporeality causes him to prefer solitude over socially engaged action (7:10), a behavioral preference culminating in his strangely narcissistic obsession with his own internal thought processes (3:23; 4:3-11). It is appropriate, then, that <a href="http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=vda.j.illbk.01&amp;java=yes">Blake's design to plate 1</a> (the frontispiece in most copies of <i>Visions</i>) depicts Theotormon in a crouching position, arms covering his eyes, ears, and mouth, completely closed to the life of the senses (Gillham 195).</p>
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<p>This is not to suggest that Theotormon's asceticism is successful or without important contradiction. Crucially, for example, Blake figures Theotormon's original response to Oothoon's ostensible harlotry in terms of <i>earthly</i> phenomena: "Then storms rent Theotormons limbs; he rolld his waves around. / And folded his black jealous waters round the adulterate pair" (2:3-4). While Theotormon is clearly subject in these lines to "natural" passions (figured by the violent "storms" that rend his limbs), his subsequent ability to manipulate the waves and waters raised by these internal storms evinces a significant degree of control over this aspect of his identity. But he achieves this self-mastery at a significant price. Because his God is entirely transcendent, Theotormon must completely deny the visionary and redemptive possibilities of material existence, possibilities suggested among other things by Oothoon's complex proposition that "every thing that lives is holy" (8:10). According to Theotormon's negative theology, in other words, all of nature's seeming attractions can only be distractions; and since he has learned to see his passions as aspects of natural rather than spiritual being, he must constantly "cleanse" himself via acts of self-expurgation and penance. Hence, in the <a href="http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=vda.j.illbk.09&amp;java=yes">design to plate 9</a>, Theotormon flagellates his body with a three-thonged whip, whose knots, as Erdman has noted, "look uncannily like the heads of the Marygold flowers" in the <a href="http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=vda.j.illbk.03&amp;java=yes">design to plate 3</a> (<i>Illuminated</i> 134)&#8212;iconographic evidence that the natural forms inspiring multiplicitous vision in Oothoon (see 1:6-7) can only be vehicles of self-torment for Theotormon. Significantly, after binding Oothoon and Bromion "back to back in Bromions caves," Theotormon assumes a position at the cave's entrance, where he sits "wearing the threshold hard / With secret tears" (2:5-7). Theotormon's tears are "secret," for, as a practitioner of asceticism, he must deny his emotions, which he attributes to the sensual or embodied portion of being. Such denial thus becomes another form of self-mortification as Theotormon "wear[s] the threshold hard," figuratively clothing himself in a penitential garment of stone&#8212;a version of the ascetic's hairshirt&#8212;whose petrific, impenetrable surface signifies Theotormon's extreme self-enclosure, his unwillingness to entertain any open encounter with earthly otherness.</p>
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<p>There can be no doubt that Oothoon is severely traumatized by the violation and stereotyping she undergoes at the hands of Bromion, as well as by Theotormon's self-righteous and insensitive treatment of her. Consider, for example, her subsequent invocation of Theotormon's eagles:</p>
<blockquote>I call with holy voice! kings of the sounding air,<br/>
Rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect.<br/>
The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast.<br/>
The Eagles at her call descend &amp; rend their bleeding prey . . . .<br/>
(2:14-17)</blockquote>
<p>In this passage, Oothoon's rhetoric of purity and defilement reveals her unwitting capitulation to Theotormon's ascetic dualism (which opposes chastity to harlotry), while her use of the verb "rend" in her instruction to Theotormon's eagles implies, most appallingly, an invited repetition of Bromion's act of rape. Indeed, since Bromion's earlier rending of Oothoon with his clamorous "thunders" (1:16) implies a regal exercise of elemental control, we may align him directly with Theotormon's eagles, the "kings of the <i>sounding</i> air." Hence, while highlighting the mutual implication of Theotormon's theology and Bromion's colonialist praxis, Oothoon's invocation of and encounter with the eagles demonstrates the extent to which her own pursuit of "purity" tends inadvertently to presuppose and perpetuate the most profound violence.</p>
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<p>Such violence recalls the eagle's traditional figural association with imperialist politics. During the course of Western history, this predatory bird had served emblematic functions in such countries as Rome, Austria, France, Germany, and Russia; and, in 1782, only eleven years prior to the production of <i>Visions</i>, the United States adopted the eagle as emblem for its official seal (Vogler 30-31n). Since at one level of <i>Visions</i>' political allegory Oothoon is America, and since Bromion rapaciously expropriates her "soft American plains" and the regions comprising her "north &amp; south" to his material empire, we must consider the eagle in <i>Visions</i> as a figure for empire, the political and geographical entity before which colonized individuals must "open their hearts" or be forcefully "rent" in opposition. Hence, in both the text and in the <a href="http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=vda.j.illbk.06&amp;java=yes">design to plate 6</a> the eagles' rending of Oothoon's breast functions to emphasize the latter's political subjection. In this context, "the soft soul of America"&#8212;America's liberatory idealism&#8212;is devoured by the brutal reality of America as a burgeoning empire being built upon the backs, and written in the blood, of slaves.</p>
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<p>It is most appropriate, then, that Oothoon's account of her rending by the predatory eagles is directly preceded <a href="http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=vda.j.illbk.05&amp;java=yes">on plate 5</a> by an illustration of a black slave-laborer, whom Blake depicts nearly prostrate upon the ground, lying beside an almost horizontal, grotesquely blighted tree. In the approximate symmetry of their spatial design, these juxtaposed human and arboreal figures evince an iconographic equation. On the one hand, the oppressed slave, valued primarily as a physical instrument of enforced labor, is reduced to the status of a mere natural object (like the tree), becoming, from the master's standpoint, simply another aspect of the exploitable physical environment. (Blake further emphasizes this process of "othering" by depicting the slave's arms in such a manner that they appear to be rooted, like tree limbs, to the ground.) On the other hand, insofar as the near-horizontal form of the blighted tree in turn mirrors the prostrate form of the slave, the tree can be seen to represent a natural world that has, like the African laborer, been destructively enslaved. The message seems straightforward enough. As competing imperial powers rush to exploit new resource-bases, importing to the New World the mercantilist practice of human slavery, the environmental problems Blake associates with the metropolitan center&#8212;a place of "cities turrets &amp; towers &amp; domes / Whose smoke destroy[s] the pleasant gardens &amp; whose running Kennels / Chok[e] the bright rivers" (FZ 9:167-69; E390)&#8212;are extended to the New World's colonized landscapes.</p>
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<p>In a context wherein the transcendental eagle of imperialist politics emblematizes the violation of enslaved peoples <i>and</i> landscapes, all creatures&#8212;both human and non-human&#8212;are potentially affected. Consider, for example, the figural significance of <i>Visions</i>' "jealous dolphins," the creatures Bromion invites to "sport around" Oothoon directly after he rapes her (1:19). How, one might ask, do dolphins&#8212;traditional symbols of philanthropy, love, and salvation (Baine 206)&#8212;come to be so negatively anthropomorphized in Blake's allegory of colonialism? To seek an answer to this question, it will be helpful to return to Stedman's <i>Narrative</i>. In recounting the events of his voyage from Europe to Dutch Guiana, Stedman writes that the interval was rendered "exceedingly pleasant ... by the many <i>dolphins</i> or <i>dorados</i>, ... beautiful fish [which] seem to take peculiar delight in sporting around the vessels" (1796; 1.9). (Notice that Blake's dolphins also "sport around" in <i>Visions</i>.) Continuing his discussion in a more philosophical mode, Stedman goes on to remark that</p>
<blockquote>The <i>real</i> dolphin, which is of the cetaceous kind, was <i>anciently</i> celebrated in poetic story on account of its philanthropy and other supposed virtues: but to the dorado or dolphin of the <i>moderns</i>, this character is far from being applicable, this fish being extremely voracious and destructive, and is known to follow the ships, and exhibit his sports and gambols, not from attachment to mankind, but from the more selfish motive of procuring food.... The circumstance which chiefly entitles the dorado to our attention is, the unrivalled and dazzling brilliancy of its colours in the water, the whole of its back ... appear[ing] as bespangled all over with jewels.... (1796; 1.9-10)<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#12">12</a></sup></blockquote>
<p>Stedman's alignment of the "real dolphin" with poetic sensibility offers a helpful clue concerning the way Oothoon would likely view the ostensibly less poetic dorado. Since Oothoon is "Open," in <i>Visions</i>, "to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears" (6:22), we can speculate that she would not debase this "dolphin of the moderns," as Stedman does when he attributes selfishness to it, but would find in its "unrivalled and dazzling" beauty a superlative source of joy and delight. Indeed, such an aesthetic would help to explain how poetic sensibility comes to anthropomorphize beautiful animals as "philanthropists"; for in contexts where non-human creatures inspire "joy and ... delight," they may be regarded quite logically as agents of human well-being. Unlike Oothoon, however, the empire-obsessed Bromion is driven to denounce and destroy "virgin joy" (6:11); and the "delights" he is capable of understanding are only those "of the merchant" (5:12). Because Bromion is a stranger to beauty and philanthropic impulse, his "modern" anthropomorphisms (to borrow Stedman's term) reflect the inevitable selfishness and paranoia of empire, so that even such beautiful creatures as dolphins become representatives of a <i>mis</i>anthropic "jealous[y]."</p>
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<p>As we have seen, however, not all of Oothoon's encounters with non-human creatures are positive ones. Since Oothoon has been colonized by Bromion in <i>Visions</i>' political allegory, and since, to a certain extent, colonialism proceeds via a pedagogical "colonizing of the mind,"<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#13">13</a></sup> we might expect Oothoon's worldview&#8212;including her discourse on non-human nature&#8212;to be adversely affected by her situation. Such influence, at any rate, would help to explain why Oothoon becomes obsessed with conceptual categories like "purity" and "defilement" in <i>Visions</i>, and why her own view of animals comes to reflect these categories (a reflection we have noted, for example, in her sadomasochistic view of predatory eagles as agents of her own purification). But Oothoon is no colonialist automaton, and she is by no means unaware that her physical enslavement has harmful ideological dimensions and ramifications. Thus she attacks her cultural conditioning on the most fundamental of levels.</p>
<blockquote>They told me that the night &amp; day were all that I could see;<br/>
They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up.<br/>
And they inclos'd my infinite brain into a narrow circle.<br/>
And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning<br/>
Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.<br/>
(2:30-34)</blockquote>
<p>Here, in a nutshell, is Oothoon's critique of the epistemology of empire, the <i>empir</i>icism that attempts to consolidate an "empire of man" over all other creatures. Her reference to "night &amp; day" underscores the divisiveness of Western categorical thought, which conceptualizes existence according to binary oppositions (night/day, black/white, slave/master, defilement/purity, animal/human, etc.) and which can tolerate no liminal or "grey" areas. Hence, while Oothoon's reference to "five senses" has been read as a metaphysical indictment of "the body as prison of the soul" (Moss 14), the grammar of the passage suggests the validity of a more overtly political interpretation. Foregrounding the pedagogical aspect of colonialist discourse, Oothoon speaks of what "They told me . . . to inclose me up," thus gesturing toward a political intention, a methodical denial of other (non-empirical, non-European) modes of knowledge carried out <i>in order</i> to subjugate and imprison ("<i>to</i> inclose . . . up") enslaved peoples. Crucially, the final result of this process is a distinctively <i>narrative</i> denial, in which Oothoon's cultural "life" is "ob-literated and erased."</p>
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<p>For his own part, however, Bromion attempts to deny this violence by representing both his naturalist theory and colonialist praxis as modes of <i>visionary</i> endeavor:</p>
<blockquote>Then Bromion said: and shook the cavern with his lamentation<br/>
Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruit;<br/>
But knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth<br/>
To gratify senses unknown? trees beasts and birds unknown:<br/>
Unknown, not unpercievd, spread in the infinite microscope,<br/>
In places yet unvisited by the voyager. and in worlds<br/>
Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown . . . .<br/>
(4:12-18)</blockquote>
<p>By declaring that this lamentation "shook the cavern," Blake's narrator acknowledges Bromion's prophetic potential, raising the possibility that even this degenerate imperialist has the power to level the walls of the "caves" in which he and Oothoon have been "Bound back to back" since the second plate of the poem (2:5; see <a href="http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=vda.j.illbk.01&amp;java=yes">design to plate 1</a>), Bromion's reference to "senses unknown" reinforces the passage's visionary quality, implying as it does the epistemological necessity of sensory expansion or cleansing. Moreover, as Mark Bracher observes, Bromion's figurative gesture toward "another <i>kind</i> of seas" seems "on the verge of escaping the empiricist bias for the manifest and tangible" (173). These interesting possibilities are subtly belied, however, by Bromion's reference to "the infinite microscope," which underscores the empirical basis of his vision. As John Locke remarks in his <i>Essay Concerning Human Understanding</i> (1690), if one's visual perception were "1000, or 1000000 [times] more acute than it is now by the best Microscope," one "would be in a quite different World from other People: Nothing would appear the same . . . the visible <i>Ideas</i> of everything would be different" (qtd. in Raine 2.125). Engaging in this sort of Lockean speculation, Bromion's discourse of discovery&#8212;his optimistic belief in a revelatory correlation between "unknown" aspects of the human sensorium and "unknown" elements in the objective world&#8212;represents what Blake would likely have decried as an empirical co-optation of revelatory vision. Ultimately, Bromion's optimism is based on his confidence in Enlightenment progress, which, by perfecting the instruments and methods of empirical inquiry, would give humanity unprecedented access to things and places only currently beyond apprehension.</p>
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<p>More revealing, perhaps, than any other aspect of his speech on the knower and the known are Bromion's claims that "trees and fruits flourish upon the earth / To gratify senses unknown," and that such gratification brings the ultimate reward, "the joys of riches and ease" (4:14-15, 21). Here, we might pause to consider Blake's nearly contemporary poem <i>The Marriage of Heaven and Hell</i>, wherein the prophet Ezekiel asks "is he honest who resists his genius or conscience. only for the sake of present <i>ease or gratification</i>?" (<i>MHH</i> 13; E39; emphasis added). The opposition Ezekiel establishes between "honest[y]" and "ease or gratification" in this rhetorical question is crucially important, especially if we bear in mind the distinctively Blakean claims that "Every honest man is a Prophet" (Anno. Watson E617) and that "the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God" (<i>MHH</i> 12; E38). Clearly, from a Blakean standpoint, Bromion's selfishness perverts or disqualifies the prophetic aspect of his utterance. A confirmed utilitarian, Bromion considers existence hedonistically, believing that one comes to know a thing by divining the many "senses unknown" in which it may be harnessed to the ends of an all-encompassing self-gratification. Embracing such an ideology, one responds to otherness, in short, by negating it in subsumption to the self.</p>
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<p>Bromion's instrumental evaluation of "trees beasts and birds unknown ... In places yet unvisited by the voyager" highlights the issue of European imperialist expansion, finding, once again, illuminating parallels in Stedman's <i>Narrative</i>. In one of his geographical descriptions, Stedman characterizes Dutch Guiana as a territory "enriched with a great variety of mineral substances," a land where "in general the soil is abundantly fruitful, the earth during the whole of the year [being] adorned with continual verdure, the trees loaded at the same time with blossoms and ripe fruit..." (1796; 1.34, 33). While such pastoral evocations tend to confirm the popular image of the New World as an Edenic garden, thus enticing European readers with the promise of unlimited prosperity in an idyllic New World landscape, they are ultimately qualified by Stedman's colonialist tendency to celebrate only geographical areas considered instrumentally valuable. Indeed, as far as Stedman is concerned, resource-based wealth and natural beauty go hand in hand. Hence, those areas that are "inhabited by Europeans, and cultivated with sugar, cocoa, cotton, and indigo plantations ... form the most delightful prospects that can be imagined" (1796; 1.36-37), while places unsuited for slave-based, plantation-style agriculture are implicitly praiseworthy only for the value of their exploitable timber and minerals. As for locations inaccessible to European navigation, they are quite simply "of little consequence to Europeans" (1796; 1.35)&#8212;or downright harmful to colonial interests (as in the case of heavily forested wilderness areas, which provided both real and potential sanctuary for escaped rebel slaves [1796; 1.3-4]). Like Blake's Bromion, Stedman implicitly values "newly discovered" lands only for their potential to increase the personal wealth, and to gratify the material desires, of their European masters.</p>
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<p>As a major contributing illustrator for Stedman's <i>Narrative</i>, Blake would likely have been struck not only by the work's manifold discussions of human slavery (which Blake's commentators have examined in detail) but also by its impressive pictorial and textual catalogues of "trees and fruits . . . beasts and birds unknown" (VDA 4:14-15). Like many contemporary writers of "exploration literature" and New World ethnography, Stedman takes care extensively to catalogue the plant, insect, and animal life he encounters in his travels; and more than half of <i>Narrative</i>'s eighty-one engraved illustrations deal with botanical and zoological subject matter (Blake himself having depicted, in at least four engravings, four species of monkey, a giant Aboma snake, some Limes, the Capsicum Mamee Apple, and various nuts). In its careful taxonomy of nature, Stedman's published text participates in the expansion of European naturalistic empire by extending knowledge of, and thus a certain mastery over, the terrains and topographies of the New World. Moreover, the text's intermixing of naturalist and ethnographic subject matter&#8212;highlighted most explicitly in Stedman's figurative description of the celebrated slave-girl Joanna as a "forsaken plant" (1796; 1.90)&#8212;draws an implicit parallel between the European objectification of plants and animals, on the one hand, and the objectification of human beings, on the other, each of which are valuable to the empire primarily in an instrumental capacity. It is hardly surprising, then, that Blake's Bromion, who wishes to subject all things to the taxonomizing scrutiny of his phallic "infinite microscope," ultimately finishes his lecture on the marvels of nature by celebrating "the joys of riches and ease" in a world that is monolithically governed by "one law for both the lion and the ox" (4:21-22).</p>
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<p>By examining parallels between human and environmental subjugation in <i>Visions</i>, I do not mean to efface crucial differences, nor do I wish to suggest that human slavery is a mere aspect of our treatment of nature (especially since colonialist discourses have often aligned non-European peoples with a "degenerate" nature in order morally to justify the subjugation of the former as an integral part of an ostensibly benevolent "civilizing mission"). However, because Oothoon herself fights for human liberty by deploying in the poem a series of arguments based on non-human exempla, <i>Visions</i>, I believe, demands a sustained focus on the relationship between colonialist and anti-colonialist treatments of humanity and nature. Consider, for example, the following passage, in which Oothoon attempts to combat Bromion's homogenizing imperialism by invoking the multiplicitous realm of animality:</p>
<blockquote>With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk?<br/>
With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse?<br/>
With what sense does the bee form cells? have not the mouse &amp; frog<br/>
Eyes and ears and sense of touch? yet are their habitations.<br/>
And their pursuits, as different as their forms and as their joys:<br/>
Ask the wild ass why he refuses burdens: and the meek camel<br/>
Why he loves man: is it because of eye ear mouth or skin<br/>
Or breathing nostrils? No. for these the wolf and tyger have.<br/>
Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave, and why her spires<br/>
Love to curl round the bones of death; and ask the rav'nous snake<br/>
Where she gets poison: &amp; the wing'd eagle why he loves the sun<br/>
And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old.<br/>
(3:2-13)</blockquote>
<p>In this remarkable passage, Oothoon attempts to derive what Blake's friend Henry Fuseli referred to as animals' "allegoric Utility" (qtd. in Bentley 170). The logic informing her argument is as follows: If the heterogeneous behaviors and pursuits of non-human creatures cannot be entirely accounted for by way of reference to "eye ear mouth ... skin" and "breathing nostrils," then neither should human behavior be understood simply in terms of sensual responses to pre-given empirical data&#8212;especially if Oothoon is correct in her implicit claim that human actions, like the human brain, are potentially "infinite" (2:32) in scope. But while Oothoon exploits the "allegoric utility" of animals to support her arguments for human emancipation, she does not do so in an arrogantly anthropocentric way. Indeed, according to the rhetorical structure of her argument, an open-minded inquiry into the nature of non-human being provides a prerequisite basis for <i>human</i> self-reflection: first we are to consider the otherness and difference of animals, "And <i>then</i>," Oothoon declares, we may "tell [her] the thoughts of man." At the very least, she suggests, "man" must be understood <i>contextually</i>, not as an abstract, conceptually pure category of being.</p>
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<p>Kathleen Raine has argued convincingly that Oothoon's discourse on animals and sensory perception owes an intertextual debt to Emanuel Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences,<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#14">14</a></sup> which posits a correlation between an entity's "Internal" makeup and the actions it undertakes in the "External" world. Here is an excerpt from Swedenborg's summary of the matter:</p>
<blockquote>[T]here is in every Thing an Internal and an External, and . . . the External dependeth on the Internal, as the Body does on its Soul . . . . For the Illustration of this Truth it may suffice to consider a few Particulars respecting a Silkworm, [and] a Bee . . . . The Internal of the Silkworm is that, by Virtue whereof its External is impelled to spin its silken Web, and afterwards to assume Wings like a Butterfly and fly abroad. The Internal of a Bee is that, by Virtue whereof its External is impelled to suck Honey out of Flowers, and to construct waxen Cells after a wonderful Form . . . . (Swedenborg 2.417)</blockquote>
<p>By arguing that every creature's "External dependeth on the Internal," Swedenborg, like Oothoon, grants priority to an intrinsic rather than extrinsic makeup of being,<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#15">15</a></sup> implying possibilities of perception that Bromion's empiricist doctrine of the "five senses" refuses to sanction. Accordingly, individuals are centers of dynamic activity, not mere, passive receptors of externally imposed sensations. But where Swedenborg uses a vaguely deterministic vocabulary to speak of creaturely activity (stating that bees and silkworms are "impelled" to behave in certain ways), Blake's Oothoon chooses to speak of such activity in terms of multiplicitous "joys" and "loves" (3:6, 8, 11-12), terms carrying connotations of freedom rather than coercion or enslavement. By attributing the delights of joy and love to non-human creatures, Oothoon not only avoids the determinism implicit in Swedenborg's notion of creaturely impulsion; she also problematizes the influential Cartesian hypothesis that animals are soulless automata, ultimately incapable of experiencing either pleasure or pain. Moreover, by relentlessly particularizing animals&#8212;by emphasizing that "their habitations" and "pursuits" are "as different as their forms and as their joys" (3:5-6)&#8212;Oothoon's counter-discourse strives to deconstruct the homogenizing concept of animality itself, thus challenging Bromion's philosophical claim that there can be "one law for both the lion and the ox" (4:22). Rigorously undertaken, such a deconstruction would have the most profound social and environmental implications; for, as Jacques Derrida observes, the concept of animality presupposes the drawing of an oppositional limit which "<i>itself</i> blurs the differences, the diff&#233;rance and the differences, not only between man and animal, but among animal societies, and, within the animal societies and within human society itself, so many differences" (183).<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#16">16</a></sup> In <i>Visions</i>, Blake's Oothoon combats the all-encompassing violence of colonialism via a conceptual multiplication of difference in its manifold cultural <i>and</i> ecological manifestations. She aims, in short, to convince her listeners to respect and celebrate what renowned biologist E. O. Wilson calls "the diversity of life" (passim).</p>
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<p>As if to combat the violent rapacity of Bromion's monolithic imperialism, Oothoon deploys a sexual metaphor to represent her experience of life in the multiplicitous world she envisions. She is, she declares,</p>
<blockquote>Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears<br/>
If in the morning sun I find it: there my eyes are fix'd<br/>
In happy copulation; if in evening mild, wearied with work;<br/>
Sit on a bank and draw the pleasures of this free born joy.<br/>
(6:22-7:2)</blockquote>
<p>Oothoon's "openness" and her use of the term "copulation" to characterize her encounter with beauty recall early modern concepts of the eye as a sexual organ, a kind of optic vagina through which the mind was thought to be "impregnated" by visual stimuli.<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#17">17</a></sup> In Blake's poetics, however, these figures of openness and copulation also carry spiritual connotations, since they anticipate <i>Jerusalem</i>'s highly privileged and implicitly sexualized concept of Eternal emanational encounter, wherein discrete and integral individuals meet in a process of "mutual interchange," "comingl[ing]" ecstatically "from the Head even to the Feet" (see <i>J</i> 88:3-11, E246; 69:43, E223). Such profound interchange is implicit in Oothoon's rhetorical synaesthesia. By figuring her visual perception of beauty in terms of copulative touch, Oothoon articulates an imaginative alternative to the oppositional subject/object dynamic so often associated with the economy of the gaze. When perceptual vision is understood as a mode of touch, the distance separating perceiver and perceived is conceptually minimized, imaginatively bringing subjects and objects into the most proximate, mutually affective relationality. What is more, Oothoon's metaphor of visual or visionary copulation mitigates against the dualism of an Enlightenment philosophy that represents mentality rather than biology as "characteristic of the human and . . . what is 'fully and authentically' human" (Plumwood 169); for, by conceptualizing aesthetic apprehension in terms of sexual communion, her metaphor strives imaginatively to bring human biological and mental aspects into a kind of reconciliatory unison.</p>
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<p>And yet, Oothoon's subsequent cry, "Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind!" (7:16), encodes in its repetitions and multiple exclamation points a degree of hyperbolical protestation that, rather than conveying prophetic confidence in her vision of unbridled consummation with otherness, suggests trauma and hysteria. It is difficult, in other words, not to see Oothoon's overly emphatic cry as the compensatory reaction of a brutalized, insulted, and enslaved being trying desperately to regain the optimism of an earlier innocence. Such a state of affairs would, at any rate, help to account for the disconcertingly problematic scenario Oothoon imagines as a viable alternative to Theotormon's "hypocrite modesty," the "self-love that envies all" (6:16; 7:21):</p>
<blockquote>But silken nets and traps of adamant will Oothoon spread,<br/>
And catch for thee girls of mild silver, or of furious gold;<br/>
I'll lie beside thee on a bank &amp; view their wanton play<br/>
In lovely copulation bliss on bliss with Theotormon:<br/>
Red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first born beam,<br/>
Oothoon shall view his dear delight, nor e'er with jealous cloud<br/>
Come in the heaven of generous love; nor selfish blightings bring.<br/>
(7:23-29)</blockquote>
<p>While this passage is syntactically ambivalent and therefore difficult to interpret with precision,<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#18">18</a></sup> it nevertheless seems very much at odds with the emancipatory politics Oothoon articulates earlier in the poem. As Leopold Damrosch, Jr., observes (198), Oothoon's "silken nets and traps of adamant" troublingly recall the religious "nets &amp; gins &amp; traps" (5:18) she so emphatically denounces earlier in the poem, mechanisms used "to catch virgin joy, / And brand it with the name of whore" (6:11-12). Furthermore, the narcissistic aspect of her fantasy not only servilely defers or denies the gratification of her <i>own</i> sexual desire; by foregoing her own participatory touch in the encounter, Oothoon's narcissism also contradicts her earlier synaesthetic ideal of visual-tactile copulation. Far from liberating herself from the tyranny of systemic sexual oppression, Oothoon seems unwittingly willing to perpetuate it and, as procuress, to extend it (and the stereotype of harlotry) to other innocent "girls,"<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#19">19</a></sup> whose associations with "silver" and "gold" suggest something of their commodification in Oothoon's sexual fantasy.</p>
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<p>In the subsequent lines of the poem, however, Oothoon invokes precious metals in order forcefully to indict, and to remark the dire consequences of, a cultural milieu that reduces all things&#8212;whether human or otherwise&#8212;to the instrumental status of commodity; and it is here that the revolutionary tones of her earlier environmental and sociopolitical critique begin to reassert themselves.</p>
<blockquote>Does the sun walk in glorious raiment. on the secret floor<br/>
Where the cold miser spreads his gold? or does the bright cloud drop<br/>
On his stone threshold? does his eye behold the beam that brings<br/>
Expansion to the eye of pity? or will he bind himself<br/>
Beside the ox to thy hard furrow? does that mild beam blot<br/>
The bat, the owl, the glowing tyger, and the king of night.<br/>
(7:30-8:5)</blockquote>
<p>Oothoon's miser is, residually, an alchemist: though his "cold[ness]" suggests that he has lost all sense of alchemical creative wonder, he nevertheless wishes to convert all things to gold. Insofar as the pursuit of this homogeneous substance provides the binding "one law" of his existence, he resembles the Urizenic Bromion; but to the extent that his fetishistic hoarding of gold necessitates a renunciation of all self-expenditure and a paranoid withdrawal from society (which must be seen as a source of expense or potential thievery), he resembles the withdrawn and virtue-hoarding Theotormon (who, like the miser, is also associated with a "threshold" of stone [2:6]). One would hardly expect such antisocial behavior in an era of so-called enlightenment, whose "mild beam" promises humanistically to bring "Expansion to the eye of pity."<sup><a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html#20">20</a></sup> But, as the sun's "glorious raiment" is replaced by the merely reflective light of a "bright cloud," the "mild beam" of human sympathy gives way before the questionable lustre of the miser's gold (which signifies, in <i>Visions</i>' imperialist context, the stolen wealth comprising the so-called commonwealth). Under such conditions, humanity's "mild beam" is darkened to opacity, becoming that biblical mote of motes, the obstructing "beam" in the eye of self-righteous and hypocritical avarice (Matt. 7.3-5).</p>
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<p>Writing on the relationship between enlightenment and imperialism in his 1796 treatise <i>Illustrations of Prophecy</i>, Joseph Lomas Towers posed a question that can help us to appreciate the urgency of this ethical dilemma: "Are we not apprized," he asked, "that the guilt of nations, as well as of individuals, is enhanced in proportion to the degree of light and knowledge which heaven has vouchsafed them?" (1.xv). Living in an era of unprecedented "light and knowledge," but failing to behold "the beam that brings / Expansion to the eye of pity," Oothoon's miser becomes a figure for the culpability of an empire whose practices of cultural exploitation and slavery are decidedly at odds with its professed morality. Not only does the miser's unenlightened avarice disable sympathetic identification with other humans; his ironically named "mild beam" also disables any sympathetic concern for the natural environment and its non-human inhabitants, "blot[ting]," as it does, "The bat, the owl, the glowing tyger, and the king of night." According to Oothoon, for whom "every thing that lives is holy" (8:10), even these ominously nocturnal creatures&#8212;indeed, even the symbolically decried "wild snake," whose presence in the Garden augured the loss of Judeo-Christian paradise (8:7)&#8212;are worthy of respect.</p>
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<p>Unfortunately, Oothoon's revolutionary vision is easily co-opted. After all, has not Bromion's empirical science, in surveying its proper domain, already laid claim to the objective universe? And does not this science plan to subject "every thing that lives" to the authority of its scrutinizing gaze? Moreover, has not Theotormon's institutionalized religion long denied the holiness of nature in order to claim exclusive, God-given right to define the nature of "holiness"? Indeed, in asserting the holiness of <i>every</i> living thing, Oothoon articulates a pluralism that has no recourse to exclusionary tactics, no effective strategy for separating the goats of tyranny from the lambs of righteousness. Hence, by Oothoon's own standards, even Bromion and Theotormon are holy and, therefore, worthy of respect. While Oothoon's philosophy is thus generously free of <i>ressentiment</i>, it runs the risk of political self-sabotage, for to respect representatives of tyranny is to remain potentially subject to their authority. Such a state of affairs might, perhaps, account for the rather grim scenario Blake depicts in <i>Visions</i>' concluding lines:</p>
<blockquote>Thus every morning wails Oothoon. but Theotormon sits<br/>
Upon the margind ocean conversing with shadows dire.<br/>
The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, &amp; eccho back her sighs.<br/>
(8:11-13)</blockquote>
<p>Ending with its all-too-familiar refrain of echoed sighs (cf. 2:20, 5:2), <i>Visions</i> seems ultimately to have resolved nothing. Hence, the tendency of some readers to regard Oothoon as a "failed prophet" (Anderson passim). One must note, however, that Oothoon utters at the poem's conclusion more than just despairingly impotent sighs. She also emphatically "wails"&#8212;obtrusively expressing the profundity of her sorrow and dissatisfaction&#8212;each and "every morning" (8:11), demonstrating in the process her unflagging "determination to awaken those around her" (Linkin 192). Alongside her inability to achieve timely emancipation for herself and the Daughters, Oothoon's failure to convert or reform her oppressors in fact <i>typifies</i> the prophetic condition. To quote Robert Gray's contemporary discussion of biblical prophecy, "the prophets evinced the integrity of their characters, by zealously encountering oppression, hatred, and death.... Then it was, that they firmly supported trial of cruel mockings and scourgings; yea, moreover, of bonds and imprisonment. They were . . . destitute, afflicted, tormented" (qtd. in Towers 2.325). Refusing a premature and facile apocalypticism, <i>Visions</i> soberly acknowledges the complex difficulties attending its social and environmental crises. Ending the poem without resolution, in other words, Blake places ultimate responsibility for political transformation upon his readers, forcing us not only to confront Oothoon's woes but to dwell upon them, hoping, it seems, that we will do more than merely "eccho back her sighs."</p>
</li>
</ol>
<div class="notesWorks">
<h4>Works Cited</h4>
<p class="hang">Anderson, Mark A. "Oothoon, Failed Prophet." <i>Romanticism Past and Present</i> 8.2 (1984): 1-21.</p>
<p class="hang">Bacon, Francis. <i>Novum Organum</i>. <i>The Works of Francis Bacon.</i> Vol. 4. Ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. London: Longman, 1860. 37-248.</p>
<p class="hang">Baine, "Rodney M. Bromion's 'Jealous Dolphins'". <i>Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly</i> 14.4 (1981): 206-207.</p>
<p class="hang">Bentley, G. E., Jr. <i>Blake Records</i>. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1969.</p>
<p class="hang">Bewell, Alan. "'Jacobin Plants': Botany as Social Theory in the 1790s." <i>The Wordsworth Circle</i> 20.3 (1989): 132-39.</p>
<p class="hang">Bhabha, Homi K. <i>The Location of Culture</i>. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.</p>
<p class="hang">Blake, William. <i>The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake</i>. Ed. David V. Erdman. Newly Revised ed. New York and London: Doubleday, 1988.</p>
<p class="hang">---. "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," copy J, plates i, iii, 2, 3. <i>The William Blake Archive</i>. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 9 May 2000. &lt; http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/blake/ &gt;.</p>
<p class="hang">Bracher, Mark. "The Metaphysical Grounds of Oppression in Blake's <i>Visions of the Daughters of Albion</i>." <i>Colby Library Quarterly</i> 20.3 (1984): 164-176.</p>
<p class="hang">Clark, David L. "On Being 'The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany': Dwelling with Animals after Levinas." <i>Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History</i>. Ed. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. 165-98.</p>
<p class="hang">Damrosch, Leopold, Jr. <i>Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth</i>. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.</p>
<p class="hang">Darwin, Erasmus. <i>The Botanic Garden</i>. 1791. Menston, Yorkshire, and London: The Scolar P, 1973.</p>
<p class="hang">Derrida, Jacques. "On Reading Heidegger: An Outline of Remarks to the Essex Colloquium." <i>Research in Phenomenology</i> 17 (1987): 171-85.</p>
<p class="hang">Descartes, Ren&#233;. <i>Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences.</i> 1637. <i>The Philosophical Works of Descartes</i>. Vol. 1. Ed. and trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. New York: Dover, 1955. 81-130.</p>
<p class="hang">Erdman, David V. <i>Blake, Prophet Against Empire: A Poet's Interpretation of the History of His Own Times</i>. 1954. Revised ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969.</p>
<p class="hang">---. <i>The Illuminated Blake: William Blake's Complete Illuminated Works with a Plate-by-Plate Commentary</i>. New York: Dover, 1974.</p>
<p class="hang">Gillham, D. G. <i>William Blake</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973.</p>
<p class="hang">Glanville, Joseph. <i>Plus Ultra; or, the Progress and Advancement of Knowledge Since the Days of Aristotle</i>. London: James Collins, 1668.</p>
<p class="hang">Goslee, Nancy Moore. "Slavery and Sexual Character: Questioning the Master Trope in Blake's <i>Visions of the Daughters of Albion</i>." <i>ELH</i> 57.1 (1990): 101-128.</p>
<p class="hang">Griffin, Susan. "Ecofeminism and Meaning." <i>Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature</i>. Ed. Karen J. Warren. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1997. 213-226.</p>
<p class="hang">Haigwood, Laura. "Blake's <i>Visions of the Daughters of Albion</i>: Revising an Interpretive Tradition." <i>William Blake</i>. Ed. David Punter. London: MacMillan, 1996. 94-107.</p>
<p class="hang">Heffernan, James A. W. "Blake's Oothoon: The Dilemmas of Marginality." <i>Studies in Romanticism</i> 30.1 (1991): 3-18.</p>
<p class="hang">Hoerner, Fred. "Prolific Reflections: Blake's Contortion of Surveillance in <i>Visions of the Daughters of Albion</i>." <i>Studies in Romanticism</i> 35.1 (1996): 119-150.</p>
<p class="hang">Howard, John. <i>Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake's Lambeth Prophecies</i>. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UPs, 1984.</p>
<p class="hang">Lenz, Joseph. "'Base Trade': Theatre as Prostitution." <i>ELH</i> 60.4 (1993): 833-855.</p>
<p class="hang">Linkin, Harriet Kramer. "Revisioning Blake's Oothoon." <i>Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly</i> 23.4 (1990): 184-194.</p>
<p class="hang">Marx, Leo. <i>The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America</i>. 1964. rpt. New York: Oxford UP, 1967.</p>
<p class="hang">Merchant, Carolyn. <i>The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution</i>. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980.</p>
<p class="hang">Moss, John G. "Structural Form in Blake's <i>Visions of the Daughters of Albion</i>." <i>The Humanities Association Bulletin</i> 22.2 (1971): 9-18.</p>
<p class="hang">Plumwood, Val. "Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism." <i>Ecological Feminist Philosophies</i>. Ed. Karen J. Warren. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1996. 155-180.</p>
<p class="hang">Punter, David. "Blake, Trauma and the Female." <i>New Literary History</i> 15.3 (1984): 475-490.</p>
<p class="hang">Raine, Kathleen. <i>Blake and Tradition</i>. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968.</p>
<p class="hang">Soyinka, Wole. <i>Myth, Literature and the African World</i>. 1976. rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.</p>
<p class="hang">Stedman, John Gabriel. <i>Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, Transcribed for the First Time from the 1790 Manuscript</i>. Eds. Richard Price and Sally Price. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.</p>
<p class="hang">---. <i>Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America; from the Year 1772, to 1777</i>. 2 vols. London: Joseph Johnson and J. Edwards, 1796.</p>
<p class="hang">Swedenborg, Emanuel. <i>True Christian Religion; Containing the Universal Theology of the New Church</i>. 2 vols. London, 1781.</p>
<p class="hang">Thiong'o, Ngugi wa. <i>Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature</i>. London: James Currey, 1986.</p>
<p class="hang">Towers, Joseph Lomas. <i>Illustrations of Prophecy: In the Course of which are Elucidated Many Predictions</i>. 2 vols. London: 1796.</p>
<p class="hang">Vine, Steven. "'That Mild Beam': Enlightenment and Enslavement in William Blake's <i>Visions of the Daughters of Albion</i>." <i>The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison</i>. Ed. Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 40-63.</p>
<p class="hang">Vogler, Thomas A. "Intertextual Signifiers and the Blake of That Already." <i>Romanticism Past and Present</i> 9.1 (1985): 1-33.</p>
<p class="hang">Wilkie, Brian. <i>Blake's Thel and Oothoon</i>. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, ELS Monograph Series, vol. 48, 1990.</p>
<p class="hang">Wilson, Edward O. <i>The Diversity of Life</i>. New York and London: Norton, 1992.</p>
<p class="hang">Worster, Donald. <i>Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas</i>. Second ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.</p>
</div>
<div class="notesWorks">
<h4>Notes</h4>
<p class="indent"><a name="*"> </a>*&#160;&#160; An earlier version of this paper was presented in April, 2000, at the annual meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association (Buffalo, New York). I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generous financial support received during the researching and writing of this essay.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="1"> </a>1&#160;&#160;See, for example, Nancy Moore Goslee, "Slavery and Sexual Character," page 108; David Punter, "Blake, Trauma and the Female," pages 483-484; Brian Wilkie, <i>Blake's Thel and Oothoon</i>, page 65; Mark Bracher, "Metaphysical Grounds of Oppression," page 167; and Laura Haigwood, "Blake's Visions," page 99.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="2"> </a>2&#160;&#160;For additional comments concerning the human right of "dominion" or "empire" over nature, Francis Bacon's <i>Novum Organum</i> (114) and Ren&#233; Descartes' <i>Discourse on Method</i> (119). See also Donald Worster's <i>Nature's Economy</i>, Chapter Two.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="3"> </a>3&#160;&#160; All references to Blake's writing are to David V. Erdman's edition of <i>The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake</i>. In my parenthetical citations I refer first to plate and line numbers (for example, 1:20-21) and second, where appropriate, to the page number where the citation occurs in the Erdman edition (for example, E46). In my citations I also make use of the following abbreviations, where necessary, to signify individual works: MHH (<i>The Marriage of Heaven and Hell</i>); VDA (<i>Visions of the Daughters of Albion</i>); FZ (<i>The Four Zoas</i>); J (<i>Jerusalem</i>); Anno. (<i>Annotations</i>). All references to Blake's poetic designs for <i>Visions</i> are to Copy J, reproduced both in Erdman's <i>Illuminated Blake</i> and on-line in <i>The William Blake Archive</i>. My plate numbering follows the order established by Erdman.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="4"> </a>4&#160;&#160; Here Marx quotes Captain Arthur Barlowe, who uses the "abundant garden" image to describe his first impression of Virginia in 1754. Marx points out that the "ecological image" of America as a bountiful garden was accompanied historically by the less romantic image, embraced by New England's Puritan settlers, of America as a "hideous wilderness" that needed to be conquered and tamed (42-43).<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="5"> </a>5&#160;&#160;See, for example, Erdman, <i>Prophet</i>, page 239; John Howard, <i>Infernal Poetics</i>, pages 97 and 102; and Steven Vine, "That Mild Beam," page 58.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="6"> </a>6&#160;&#160;As early as 1721, one of the possible significations of "rape" was "To rob, strip, plunder (a place)" (<i>Oxford English Dictionary</i>).<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="7"> </a>7&#160;&#160;For an astute discussion of the sexual politics informing Enlightenment science's effort to assert an all-encompassing human dominion over nature, see Carolyn Merchant, <i>The Death of Nature</i>, Chapter 7.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="8"> </a>8&#160;&#160;For a relevant discussion of the relationship between botany and sexual morality in the 1790s, see Alan Bewell's "Jacobin Plants," especially pages 133-134. See also Erasmus Darwin's "Loves of the Plants" (in <i>The Botanic Garden</i>), which represents a number of plant species as "harlots" (e.g., 1.133, 3.259-264).<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="9"> </a>9&#160;&#160;In this essay I discuss both the unpublished version and the extensively revised published version of Stedman's <i>Narrative</i>. I differentiate these versions herein by indicating the following dates in my parenthetical citations: 1790 for the unpublished manuscript and 1796 for the final, published text.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="10"> </a>10&#160;&#160;Among the names mentioned in the subscription list for Stedman's published text is "BLAKE (Mr. Wm.) London."<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="11"> </a>11&#160;&#160; The marked opposition between the fiercely appetitive Bromion and the obsessively ascetic Theotormon suggests the pertinence of D. G. Gillham's thesis that these characters represent "two aspects of a single divided being" (195).<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="12"> </a>12&#160;&#160; In the 1790 manuscript, Stedman does not differentiate the dolphin from the dorado. Rather, he represents these creatures as members of a single dolphin species, a species subject to divergent ancient and modern evaluations only because of historical changes in human perspective and sensibility (1790; 31-32).<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="13"> </a>13&#160;&#160; I adapt this phrase from the Kenyan revolutionary author Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who argues at length that the cultural emancipation of African peoples must proceed in part via a pedagogical "decolonization" of the mind. See <i>Decolonising the Mind</i>, especially pages 28-29. See also Wole Soyinka's <i>Myth, Literature and the African World</i>, page viii.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="14"> </a>14&#160;&#160; See Raine, <i>Blake and Tradition</i>, Volume 2, pages 127 to 128.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="15"> </a>15&#160;&#160; On the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic models of being in <i>Visions</i>, see Mark Bracher's "The Metaphysical Grounds of Oppression," especially page 169.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="16"> </a>16&#160;&#160; For Derrida's discussion of animality, I am indebted to David L. Clark, "On Being 'The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany': Dwelling with Animals after Levinas," pages 172-173.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="17"> </a>17&#160;&#160; See Joseph Lenz, "Base Trade," page 841. As Lenz points out, Roger Bacon and Vesalius (in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively), composed drawings of the eye that resembled contemporary drawings of female reproductive organs.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="18"> </a>18&#160;&#160; On the passage's syntactical ambiguity, see Harriet Kramer Linkin, "Revisioning Blake's Oothoon," page 190. For a convincing discussion of the problems attending a "fixed" interpretation of this passage, see Fred Hoerner, "Prolific Reflections," pages 147-149. And, for the possibility that Oothoon speaks of copulation figuratively rather than literally, see James A. W. Heffernan, "Blake's Oothoon," page 11.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="19"> </a>19&#160;&#160; See Laura Haigwood, "Blake's Visions," page 104.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><a name="20"> </a>20&#160;&#160; I am indebted here to Steven Vine's suggestion that the figure of the "mild beam" signifies the "ambiguous power of enlightenment." See Vine, "That Mild Beam," page 60.</p>
</div>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/hutchings-kevin">Hutchings, Kevin</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1238" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">ecology</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/william-blake" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Blake</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1284" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Visions of the Daughters of Albion</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/gender" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">gender</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1243" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">environment</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1285" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">imperialism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1286" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">colonialism</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/kevin-hutchings-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kevin Hutchings</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/john-gabriel-stedman-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Gabriel Stedman</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/british-columbia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">British Columbia</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/continent/europe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Europe</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:05:37 +0000rc-admin22486 at http://www.rc.umd.eduAbstractshttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/abstracts.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2001-11-01T00:00:00-05:00">November 2001</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/ecology/index.html">Romanticism and Ecology</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div style="text-align: center">
<h2>Romanticism &amp; Ecology</h2>
<h3>Abstracts</h3>
<p align="center"><a href="#fosso">Kurt Fosso</a> | <a href="#fulford">Timothy Fulford</a> | <a href="#hutchings">Kevin Hutchings</a><br/>
<a href="#morton">Timothy Morton</a> | <a href="#nichols">Ashton Nichols</a> | <a href="#stroup">Willam Stroup</a></p>
</div>
<p><b><a name="fosso"> </a>Kurt Fosso</b>, "'Sweet Influences': Human/Animal Difference and Social Cohesion in Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1794-1806"<br/></p>
<p>In George Stubbs's portrait of Captain Pocklington and family, the foundational relationship of husband and wife is symbolically triangulated by an animal (their horse), to whom Mrs. Pocklington gives her hand and beside which the captain stands, legs poised like and yet unlike the animal's own. Romantic-era artists' depictions of animals represent alternative, local, generally noneconomic means of social connection. Such human/animal social formations are especially prominent in the poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These poets' sociological project leads them to represent communities articulated by mysterious human-animal linkages, as in Wordsworth's "Lines Written in Early Spring," in which animals, although sentient and pleasure-loving like the speaker himself, serve as a "measure" of his difference from them. "What man has made" of animals, and what animals in turn make of man, becomes the basis for community. Coleridge's "The Nightingale" is a poem of limits and transgressions, in which social conversion is based upon linguistic and other forms of discord, violence, and desire. These and other animal depictions realize alternative turn-of-the-century forms of community founded upon a kind of ritual observance: a working-through of what remains deeply troubling in human beings' relationships with animals. Animals at no time before or since have been as central to Western conceptions of social interconnection and subjectivity. Romantic (and more recent) representations of animals may still retain a "preeminent utility," providing visions of identity, difference, and community&#8212;even for a post-Romantic age.</p>
<p>[<a href="/praxis/ecology/fosso/fosso.html">go to Fosso's essay]</a></p>
<p><b><a name="fulford"> </a>Tim Fulford</b>, "Wordsworth's 'The Haunted Tree' and the Sexual Politics of Landscape"<br/></p>
<p>My article considers a late poem by Wordsworth&#8212;"The Haunted Tree" &#8212;in the context of recent critical debates about the politics of nature in the Romantic period. I argue that Wordsworth writes landscape in symbolic terms so as to define the kind of Britishness&#8212;and British poetry&#8212;that he considers proper. That Britishness is defined against commercial capitalism, as we might expect, but also against Oriental models of government, and against the Byronic poetry that, as Wordsworth saw it, pandered to Orientalist models. Wordsworth, in short, redefines Burkean discourse in an updated natural sublime intended as a corrective to the dangerous sexual and gender roles glamorized by Byron. As such, his poem, far from being a flight from politics into nature (the "retreat" that New Historicism has found to be characteristic of Wordsworth), is a politicization of nature in terms that are both traditional and innovative. They are also conservative.</p>
<p>[<a href="/praxis/ecology/fulford/fulford.html">go to Fulford's essay]</a></p>
<p><b><a name="hutchings"> </a>Kevin Hutchings</b>, "Gender, Environment, and Imperialism in William Blake's <i>Visions of the Daughters of Albion</i>"<i><br/></i></p>
<p>This essay examines <i>Visions of the Daughters of Albion</i> (1793) in light of William Blake's poetic critique of contemporary imperialism. Its argument turns on the contention that Blake's protagonist, Oothoon, represents in <i>Visions</i> both an enslaved woman and the expropriated natural landscapes of the New World. Thus, Oothoon's brutal rape at the hands of the slave-master Bromion is understood to signify a simultaneous figural rape of her environmental aspect. Analyzing the major critical implications of this double-edged violence, the essay investigates <i>Vision</i>'s implicit thesis (based in part on Blake's poetic response to John Gabriel Stedman's contemporary writings) that the colonization of indigenous peoples and the exploitation of indigenous homelands were ideologically interrelated aspects of eighteenth-century imperialism. By drawing upon insights garnered from such fields of inquiry as ecofeminism, postcolonial theory, and the history of science, the essay also considers the theoretical and practical assumptions informing Oothoon's activist response to her doubly-colonized condition.</p>
<p>[<a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html">go to Hutchings's essay]</a></p>
<p><b><a name="morton"> </a>Timothy Morton</b>, "'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' as an Ambient Poem; a Study of a Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth"<br/></p>
<p>This essay is a testing ground for "ambience," exploring the role of space in poetics, ideology and theory, building on the conclusion to the book <i>The Poetics of Spice</i>. Though ecocriticism and ecological philosophy talk about environmental awareness and "interconnectedness," we may not be certain of what we mean by such terms. They should, for example, remind all literary scholars of the idea, and the ideology, of the aesthetic. By closely reading the famous poem "The Star" by Jane Taylor, this essay delineates some of the poetic forms involved in the inscription of environmental awareness, such as minimalism, and the foregrounding of what in structuralism is called the "contact" or medium of communication. The essay investigates the possibility of a "feminine" form of Romantic ecology in contradistinction to more masculinist versions. It uses Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida to counter the representation of ecological awareness in Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. The essay discusses the work on culture and civilization by Geoffrey Hartman and Terry Eagleton to adumbrate the ways in which public space is evoked in environmental poetics. Walter Benjamin's notion of the "dialectical image" is employed to indicate the Janus-faced nature of the poetic and ideological fantasy of "ambience" (or "aura" in Benjamin). In considering William Wordsworth's sonnet "Composed upon Westminster Bridge" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's <i>The Rime of the Ancient Mariner</i>, the essay investigates the virtues and vices of ambience, as opposed to a more Burkean, "maximalist" view of the natural world. The essay continues the line of thought explored in David Simpson's <i>Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real</i>, especially the final section, "Societies of Figures."</p>
<p>[<a href="/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html">go to Morton's essay]</a></p>
<p><b><a name="nichols"> </a>Ashton Nichols</b>, "The Loves of Plants and Animals: Romantic Science and the Pleasures of Nature"<br/></p>
<p>When Wordsworth notes his faith that "every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes," or when Keats describes an unseen nightingale pouring forth its "soul abroad / In such an ecstasy," we may be inclined to classify these lyrical claims as Romantic hyperbole, rhetorically suspect forms of anthropomorphism, overly sentimental and poetically overblown. Likewise, when Wordsworth's heart fills "with pleasure" at the sight of daffodils, or when Blake says "How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight," we may think that the poet is protesting too little or offering too much credit to the natural world for what is, in fact, a strictly "human" emotion. In this essay I will examine Romantic claims about pleasure in the natural world and pleasure derived from the natural world in terms of the "science" of the century before Darwin's <i>On the Origin of Species</i>, particularly the science of animate nature, the belief that all living things (and perhaps even "nonliving" things) were connected by a force that could be described, at least partly, in terms of the natural ability to please or to be pleased. I will conclude with a reflection on connections between the method of observational science in the Romantic period, the writing of poetry, and the sources of pleasure.</p>
<p>[<a href="/praxis/ecology/nichols/nichols.html">go to Nichols's essay]</a></p>
<p><b><a name="stroup"> </a>William Stroup</b>, "Henry Salt on Shelley: Literary Criticism and Ecological Identity"<br/></p>
<p>Henry Stephens Salt (1851-1939) engaged with Percy Shelley's poetry, prose, and ideas in a writing career that spanned a half-century. This essay considers the implications of using this pre-professional cultural critic as a model for contemporary Ecocriticism. Salt is known today as author of a biography of Thoreau and for several prescient books on animal rights; he valued Shelley as "a pioneer of humanitarianism," a term used expansively by Salt to include concerns about health and the natural world. Salt's subjective method became seen as outmoded after T.S. Eliot's infamous attacks on Shelley in <i>The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism</i> (1933). This essay revisits the failure of the ecological imagination in Eliot's critique, and in the imperatives of much subsequent criticism on Shelley and Romanticism.</p>
<p>[<a href="/praxis/ecology/stroup/stroup.html">go to Stroup's essay]</a></p>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-wordsworth-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Wordsworth</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/william-blake" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Blake</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/ashton-nichols" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ashton Nichols</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/kevin-hutchings-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kevin Hutchings</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/kurt-fosso-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kurt Fosso</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/george-stubbs" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">George Stubbs</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/timothy-morton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Timothy Morton</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:05:35 +0000rc-admin22479 at http://www.rc.umd.eduAbout this Volumehttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/about.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2001-11-01T00:00:00-05:00">November 2001</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/ecology/index.html">Romanticism and Ecology</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div align="center">
<h2>Romanticism &amp; Ecology</h2>
</div>
<div align="center">
<p><a href="#hypertext">About this Volume</a> | <a href="#series">About the Praxis Series</a> | <a href="#contributors">About the Contributors</a></p>
</div>
<div align="center">
<h3><a name="about" id="about"> </a>About This Volume</h3>
</div>
<h3><a name="hypertext"> </a>About this Hypertext</h3>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; margin-right: 5px">This volume of <i>Romantic Circles Praxis Series</i> includes an editor's introduction by <a href="#mckusick">James McKusick</a>, essays by <a href="#fosso">Kurt Fosso,</a> <a href="#fulford">Timothy Fulford,</a> <a href="#hutchings">Kevin Hutchings,</a> <a href="#morton">Timothy Morton,</a> <a href="#nichols">Ashton Nichols</a>, and <a href="#stroup">William Stroup</a>.</p>
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<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; margin-right: 5px">The essays and other files were marked up in HTML by <a href="mailto:byrnejo@wam.umd.edu">Joseph Byrne</a> at the University of Maryland. The volume cover and contents page were also designed and marked up by <a href="mailto:byrnejo@wam.umd.edu">Joseph Byrne.</a></p>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; margin-right: 5px">A note on the cover: The image used on the index page of this volume, <a href="http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pimage?59644+0+0">"The Peaceable Kingdom"</a> by Edward Hicks, is used by permission of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. This painting is one of 60 that Edward Hicks, an early American Quaker painter and minister, executed on this theme in his lifetime.</p>
<h3><a name="series"> </a>About the Romantic Circles Praxis Series</h3>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; margin-right: 5px">The <b>Romantic Circles Praxis Series</b> is devoted to using computer technologies for the contemporary critical investigation of the languages, cultures, histories, and theories of Romanticism. Tracking the circulation of Romanticism within these interrelated domains of knowledge, <b>RCPS</b> recognizes as its conceptual terrain a world where Romanticism has, on the one hand, dissolved as a period and an idea into a plurality of discourses and, on the other, retained a vigorous, recognizable hold on the intellectual and theoretical discussions of today. <b>RCPS</b> is committed to mapping out this terrain with the best and mo st exciting critical writing of contemporary Romanticist scholarship. The <b>Romantic Circles Praxis Series</b> was formerly known as <b>Romantic Praxis: Theory and Criticism</b>. The name was changed in November 1999.</p>
<h3><a name="contributors"> </a>About the Contributors</h3>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; margin-right: 5px"><b><a name="fosso"> </a>Kurt Fosso</b> is Associate Professor of English at Lewis &amp; Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of essays on Wordsworth and Coleridge and is currently at work on a study of pictorial and literary representations of animals in the Romantic era.<br/>
<a href="/praxis/ecology/fosso/fosso.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; margin-right: 5px"><b><a name="fulford"> </a>Timothy Fulford</b> is a Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University in Nottingham, England. He is the author of several books on Romanticism, including <i>Romanticism and Masculinity</i> (1999).<br/>
<a href="/praxis/ecology/fulford/fulford.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; margin-right: 5px"><b><a name="hutchings"> </a>Kevin Hutchings</b> is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Northern British Columbia. Currently, he is conducting research on the relationship between colonialism and ecology in English Romantic literature. His book <i>Imagining Nature: Blake's Environmental Poetics</i> will be published in 2002 by McGill-Queen's University Press.<br/>
<a href="/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; margin-right: 5px"><b><a name="mckusick"> </a>James C. McKusick</b> is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He completed his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1984. He is the author of <i>Coleridge's Philosophy of Language</i> (1986), <i>Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology</i> (2000), and <i>Literature and Nature: Four Centuries of Nature Writing</i>, co-edited with Bridget Keegan (2001). He is President of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association and Executive Director of the John Clare Society of North America.<br/>
<a href="/praxis/ecology/mckusick/mckusick_intro.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; margin-right: 5px"><b><a name="morton"> </a>Timothy Morton</b> is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of <i>The Poetics of Spice</i> (Cambridge, 2000), <i>Radical Food</i> (Routledge, 2000), <i>Shelley and the Revolution in Taste</i> (Cambridge, 1994), <i>Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650-1830</i> (Cambridge, forthcoming) with Nigel Smith, and <i>Eating Romanticism</i> (Palgrave, forthcoming).<br/>
<a href="/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; margin-right: 5px"><b><a name="nichols"> </a>Ashton Nichols</b> is Professor of English at Dickinson College. He is the author of <i>The Revolutionary 'I': Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation</i> (St. Martin's, 1998) and <i>The Poetics of Epiphany</i> (Alabama, 1987). His most recent scholarly project is a hypertext resource entitled <a href="http://www.dickinson.edu/%7Enicholsa/Romnat/romnat1.htm"><i>A Romantic Natural History: 1750-1859</i></a>.<br/>
<a href="/praxis/ecology/nichols/nichols.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p style="font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; margin-right: 5px"><b><a name="stroup"> </a>William Stroup</b> is Assistant Professor of English at Keene State College in southwestern New Hampshire. He teaches courses in British Romanticism, Nature Writing, ecocriticism, and Nonviolence in the Literary Imagination. He is the author of articles on Jane Austen and John Wesley and is developing a project on the relation between ecology and nonviolence in the works of Percy Shelley.<br/>
<a href="/praxis/ecology/stroup/stroup.html">[go to essay]</a></p></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/kurt-fosso-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kurt Fosso</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/timothy-morton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Timothy Morton</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/james-c-mckusick-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">James C. McKusick</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/william-stroup" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Stroup</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/ashton-nichols" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ashton Nichols</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/kevin-hutchings-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kevin Hutchings</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/joseph-byrne" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Joseph Byrne</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/maryland" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Maryland</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/oregon" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Oregon</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:05:34 +0000rc-admin22478 at http://www.rc.umd.eduBlake, Heidegger, Buddhism, and Deep Ecology: A Fourfold Perspective on Humanity's Relationship to Naturehttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/buddhism/economides/economides.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2007-02-01T00:00:00-05:00">February 2007</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/buddhism/index.html">Romanticism and Buddhism</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="essay"><div style="text-align: center"><h2>Romanticism and Buddhism</h2></div><div style="text-align: center"><h3>Blake, Heidegger, Buddhism, and Deep Ecology: A Fourfold Perspective on Humanity's Relationship to Nature</h3></div><div style="text-align: center"><h4>Louise Economides, University of Montana</h4></div><p class="RCabstract">This study examines the controversy surrounding Deep Ecology and argues that this branch of ecological theory usefully interrogates anthropocentric humanism. Parallels between Deep Ecology and Buddhist thought are explored as a means of countering the charge that Deep Ecology is narrowly 'romantic,' while its endebtedness to Romanticism, particularly that evident in William Blake and Martin Heidegger's phenomenology, is also acknowledged. This essay appears in _Romanticism and Buddhism_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.</p><ol><li><p>Deep ecology, that branch of environmental philosophy that most radically challenges the assumptions of anthropocentric humanism, has recently become something of a b&#234;te-noir within mainstream ecological thought. Following Luc Ferry's influential linking of deep ecology with fascism in <i>The New Ecological Order</i>, many environmental thinkers have published work criticizing the movement's anti-modernism and potentially totalitarian holism. For example, in "Ecofascism: An Enduring Temptation," Michael Zimmerman identifies instances of such holism in the politics of noted European environmentalist Dr. Walter Schoenichen and in American environmentalist J. Baird Collicott's early approval of deep ecology's "biocentric" philosophy. Citing Aldus Leopold's collectivist land ethic as a major influence upon American biocentrists, Zimmerman sums up the threat of organic holism at work in certain branches of deep ecological thought:</p><blockquote>According to Leopold, 'the land' refers to the internally related complex of organic and inorganic elements . . . that constitute a particular biome or bioregion. Leopold sometimes described these elements as being analogous to the organs of an organism. To survive, an organism's organs must cooperatively limit their behavior in ways that serve the higher good of the whole organism.&#160;Individual organisms lack ethical importance, for they are temporary instantiations of enduring species whose interlocking relationships constitute 'the land.' (400)</blockquote><p>If taken as a biological foundation for political policy, it is not difficult to see how Leopold's land ethic can lead to a form of holistic totalitarianism wherein the rights of individuals are automatically subordinated to the collective good. Similarly, in <i>Imagining Nature: Blake's</i><i>Environmental Poetics</i>, literary critic Kevin Hutchings analyzes the Polypus in Blake's <i>Jerusalem</i> as a "travesty or parody of the holistic relationality which is a definitive yet ultimately irreducible or undefinable trait of Blakean 'Life'" (194). Hutchings analyzes the Polypus as a figure whereby Blake explores the horrific implications of a human society that has been "overwhelmed by the 'Outside' or objective universe" (196) to such an extent that it behaves like an assimilating "organism" in which "the individual human loses all autonomous identity." He goes on to link such a totalitarian vision with Arne Naess's philosophy:</p><blockquote>One of the founders of the 'deep ecology' movement, Naess advocates an ethic of human 'identification' with all life, a mode of relationship entailing [according to critic Ralph Pite] 'an extension of sympathy that reaches so far and becomes so constant that the self loses any desire to differentiate between itself and the world.' (quoted in Hutchings 197)</blockquote><p>Far from offering a desirable alternative to modernity's dualistic alienation of human beings from nature as a domain to be dominated in the name of civilization, Hutchings's deep ecological Polypus embodies an inverse, pathological form of identification which "entails a holistic totalitarianism that actually forecloses ethical possibilities" (197).</p></li><li><p>Such critiques are important insofar as they identify regressive elements within the deep ecology movement that, in the name of holism, seek to efface diff&#233;rance and to deny political contingency via recourse to specious biological determinism. The historical consequences of such ideology in Nazi "blood and soil" totalitarianism should serve as a powerful reminder of the risks entailed in reactionary dismissals of modernity and of humanism's ethical legacy for our species. However, as Cary Wolfe and other scholars have pointed out, traditional liberal humanism is&#8212;in and of itself&#8212;theoretically "impoverished" when it comes to providing non-anthropocentric models for how to conceive the rights of <i>non-human</i> species. Indeed, changes currently underway in global ecology and in technology indicate that non-human nature is rapidly being altered by human culture to such an extent that any distinguishable difference between what is "natural" and what is artificial may soon be rendered meaningless. Although the cultural dimension of nature's meaning has always been a product of human artifice, the scope of physical changes underway in today's global weather systems, increasingly ubiquitous genetically modified organisms, and in continually shrinking habitat for endangered species all suggest that nature's material "diff&#233;rance" is being effaced by humanity on an unprecedented scale.&#160; Indeed, it is the latter erasure that has led contemporary ecologists such as Bill McKibben to conclude that our era marks the "end of nature" and philosophers such as Michel Serres to argue that global culture has itself become a force of nature, the human equivalent of plate tectonics (16). In other words, if we continue to apply powerful technology under the influence of a traditionally humanist mindset that remains blind to the pitfalls of anthropocentrism, nature as an "outside" will cease to function as a useful counterbalance to human activity or as a domain which provides a window onto other modes of being. In essence, the risk of humanity being reduced to a subset of biological nature feared by opponents of totalitarian holism seems far less likely today than an opposite (equally problematic) monism wherein nature is completely subsumed by the category of the human.</p></li><li><p>Insofar as it attempts to inaugurate a means of thinking alternatives to the latter dilemma, deep ecology remains a significant facet of environmental philosophy. Of all the major schools of ecological thinking currently available, deep ecology addresses most directly the problem of anthropocentrism and the need to re-consider the status of non-human entities as co-inhabitants of planet earth. It does so primarily via the Deep Ecology Platform (DEP)'s recognition of "intrinsic value" in all life forms and its assertion that human beings have no essential "right" to reduce the richness of biodiversity "except to satisfy vital needs" (Naess and Sessions quoted in <i>Deep Ecology</i> 70). Although the concepts of "inherent worth" and humanity's "vital needs" are subject to deconstruction, the platform nonetheless raises the question of why non-human life has traditionally been excluded from "subject" status in western thought, and (therefore) from inclusion within the sphere of "intrinsic value" and/or unalienable rights. Indeed, the notion of intrinsic value, I will argue, necessarily compliments the principle of "wide identification" that also underwrites deep ecological thought as an "ultimate premise" (Glasser 219). As is illustrated in Zimmerman's and Hutchings's analysis, the charge that deep ecology promotes totalitarian holism hinges largely upon exclusive attention to the "identification" principle without an acknowledgement of the tension that is produced by deep ecology's concurrent inclusion of the "intrinsic value" principle. At a fundamental level, the latter represents an attempt to acknowledge the value of both "human and nonhuman" diversity, as reflected in the platform's second basic principle: "richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of [intrinsic] values" (Naess and Sessions quoted in <i>Deep Ecology</i>&#160; 70). It is difficult to see how a commitment to human diversity as a "value in [itself]" gels with the charge of totalitarian holism leveled by critics of deep ecology. Moreover, diverse traditions have informed the philosophical premises of the DEP (including Spinozan Christianity, feminism, pre-industrial or "primal" cultures, ecological science, contemporary physics and&#8212;particularly significant for the present study&#8212;Romanticism and Eastern religion).</p></li><li><p>The humanist tradition in Western thought enables us to contemplate human life's "intrinsic value," arguably one of the most important ethical achievements of this philosophy. Although subject to the charge of logical fallacy (it might be argued that nothing has inherent value but that all value derives from human attribution), the principle nonetheless possesses a certain wisdom insofar as it guards against the reduction of value to utility. This is why Kant's "categorical imperative" asserts that it is wrong to see a human being as a "means" to some end rather than as an "end in his/herself"&#8212;i.e. to see subjects in terms of their functional utility rather than as entities with a value that transcends all notions of use. Following in this tradition, Naess attempts to extend the concept of what constitutes an "end in itself" to non-human entities. Thus, following Tom Regan, he defines "intrinsic value" as "the presence of inherent value in a natural object . . .&#160;independent of any awareness, interest, or appreciation of it by any conscious being" (Regan quoted in Naess&#160; 197). The humanist tradition, however, maintains that differences in kind which exist between humans and animals (language use, rationality, capacity for ethical behavior) justifies their exclusion from the domain of "intrinsic rights." For example, Kant maintained that because animals lacked consciousness, they could not be ends in themselves but were mere means to human ends. Given recent discoveries regarding animal consciousness in the field of cognitive ethology and regarding humanity's close genetic kinship with other animals, many of the discriminatory markers invoked by earlier humanist thinkers have proven to be problematic and/or not nearly as clearly defined as was once believed. Deep ecology challenges us to reconsider why we continue to deny that non-human life can also be perceived as possessing inherent worth and why, for purposes of expediency, human beings should automatically have the right to determine a natural entity's value, or, conversely, to deny it. In order to consider the possibility that non-human life forms might possess intrinsic value, deep ecologists have had to seek philosophical models beyond those afforded in humanism, insights derived from non-dominant traditions within Western thought and in Eastern traditions such as Buddhism.&#160;&#160;&#160;</p></li><li><p>Humanity's ability to identify with certain non-human life forms may at first seem to be a sufficient basis for attributing intrinsic value to an entity, yet in actuality identification alone in no way ensures that an organism's right to life will be acknowledged. For example, human beings might identify with a tiger's strength and beauty or a wolf's intelligence, yet this very identification contributes to the slaughter of tigers for aphrodisiac products in the Far East and has contributed to our competitive drive to exterminate the wolf in the West. Likewise, the popularity of bird feathers and furs as objects of aesthetic admiration (human identification with the beauty of these things) has contributed to extinction and/or drastic reduction in the populations of other animals. This is why "wide identification" alone is an insufficient principle upon which to ground an ecological philosophy that goes beyond the limitations of traditional humanism. Conversely, if we cannot identify with non-human life at all (seeing human interests as being entirely distinct from the interests of other organisms and denying the latter a capacity for thought or feeling) then we also run the risk of objectifying and exploiting natural entities as wholly alien "others." In an effort to avoid either scenario, deep ecology attempts to counterbalance "wide identification" with an acknowledgement of all life's "intrinsic value." The great risk of this strategy is that, from a conventionally rational perspective, it may appear to be incoherent. Operating from within such a perspective, one might critique the logic of asking human beings to identify with natural entities while simultaneously asserting that life's value is ultimately "independent" of any human "awareness, interest, or appreciation" of it. From such a standpoint, a philosophy must choose whether it bases its ethical claims upon principles of sameness (identification) or diff&#233;rance (attribution of value to things because they resist the homogenizing effects of identification).&#160;&#160; &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;</p></li><li><p>This paper will make a case for the necessity of deep ecology's inclusion of these apparently contradictory (but actually complementary) principles within its philosophical framework. Three key sources of deep ecological thought&#8212;Romanticism, Martin Heidegger's philosophy, and Buddhism&#8212; collectively illustrate the importance of combining both "wide identification" and "intrinsic value" in one's environmental ethos. William Blake's monistic art demonstrates the vital importance of human identification with nature; Martin Heidegger's late philosophy outlines the limitations of identification and the need to acknowledge "intrinsic value" in non-human entities; and Buddhist thought parallels both approaches, providing a means for recognizing their complementarity. Conceptually, this essay will revolve around the insight suggested in Zen master Ch'ing-Y&#252;an's famous sermon on mountains and waters (Sheng-yu Lai&#160; 358-359).&#160;Ch'ing-Y&#252;an states that when he first began to study Zen, mountains were mountains and waters were waters, when he thought he understood Zen, mountains were <i>not</i> mountains and waters were <i>not</i> waters, and when he actually experienced Zen awakening mountains were again mountains and waters were again waters. One way to interpret this sermon is to note that we in the West are inheritors of a dominant mode of dualistic thinking wherein mountains and waters appear to be objects existing "outside" the human subject, which could be likened to the first phases of understanding in Ch'ing-Y&#252;an's sermon. However, we also inherit a less dominant tradition (Romanticism) that seeks to foster a mode of consciousness that transforms mountains and waters into phenomena the subject identifies with on a deeper level. In this second phase of awareness, mountains no longer appear to be the objects they once were, but take on an altered phenomenological status within the mind of the perceiver. Yet, such identification must go a step further in order for the human subject to achieve a truly enlightened relationship with mountains and waters. A third phase must be achieved wherein mountains and waters again are acknowledged as being separable from humanity, although this insight is now accompanied by a greater sense of compassion than was available at the outset. Inspired by Ch'ing-Y&#252;an's sermon, this paper will consider whether deep identification is a necessary prerequisite to "letting things be," by acknowledging that such identification does not require a one way projection of human identity onto nature, nor an insistence that nature be absolutely revealed to us. True identification humbly acknowledges the limits of human understanding and values the mystery of nature's "suchness"&#8212;its irreducible otherness&#8212;by creating a space for acknowledging its "intrinsic value."</p></li><li><p>In "Blake's Deep Ecology, or the Ethos of Otherness," critic Mark Lussier usefully revises the traditional characterization of Blake as an archetypal champion of art and reviler of nature as something hostile to the imagination. As he convincingly illustrates, what Blake objected to was the Cartesian construct of nature as an object domain separable from human consciousness, a world of dead matter that could be exploited ad infinitum to benefit humanity's estate. In such a view, nature's unpredictability is effaced within a mechanistic framework that characterizes it as a machine-like system composed of discreet parts, whose power can be harnessed by human beings. Nature remains a material other, but one that can be controlled by humanity. Blake's texts&#8212;perhaps more than those of any other Romantic poet&#8212;consistently subvert this construction of nature and the anthropocentric subjectivity that underwrites it. This is because of his conviction (expressed in a 1799 letter to Rev. Dr. Trusler) that "to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself" (<i>Complete Poetry</i>&#160; 702). For Blake, nature and humanity are in fact one, originally unified in Albion, the Eternal Man. Albion's fragmentation gave rise to the dualistic illusion that humanity is separate from nature, but Imaginative perception&#8212;particularly that enacted in poetic reflection&#8212;reveals the true interconnection of all things. In order to experience what a deep ecologist might term "wide identification" with nature, however, Blake asserted that we must revise our atomistic understanding of subjectivity in order to comprehend all existence as reflecting the Human Form Divine. Within this monistic schema, all entities share humanity's capacity for intellect, feeling, and "speech" because, on a deep level, they are synonymous with the human mind or imagination.&#160;&#160;</p></li><li><p>Blake realized that human identification with nature requires an acknowledgment of how non-human entities "signify" even though they don't literally possess human language. This is why, in poems such as "The Book of Thel" natural entities "speak" to Thel in the sense that they are capable of educating her if she is receptive to their lessons. As Lussier points out, this poem anticipates what we would today describe as an ecological awareness that "every thing that lives, / Lives not alone, nor for itself" (II: 26-27)&#8212;that although lilies, clouds, worms and human beings are (as individuals) impermanent, they sustain wider networks of life that do not pass away. This is why the Lilly (Blake's spelling) of the field explains she doesn't lament death because her life nourishes other animals like the lamb and the bee. Likewise, a little cloud explains that when it appears to vanish, it in fact remains part of the water cycle that gives "tenfold life" (II: 11) to other beings. Thel's existential dilemma (a uniquely human dilemma) is that she cannot accept either her mortality or her integration within the web of life. This is why Thel fears that she "live[s] only to be at death the food of worms," to which the cloud replies "Then if thou art the food of worms. O virgin of the skies, / How great thy use, how great thy blessing" (II: 23-26).&#160; Here, the text playfully subverts Thel's speciesist revulsion at the prospect of becoming worm food by reversing the anthropocentric assumption that human beings use nature (but not vice versa) to celebrate Thel's inescapable "purposiveness" within ongoing natural cycles. Yet, due to a dualistic philosophy that locates subjectivity exclusively in the individual's disembodied mind, Thel is incapable of consciously accepting her own impermanence, an understanding that would provide insight into what Lussier terms "the splendors of a complementary, undifferentiated existence" (55). As many commentators have pointed out, an acceptance of impermanence as an existential condition common to all things is also a major facet of Buddhist thought, one that implies a need for the individual ego to free itself from a grasping mentality that would seek to escape or avoid such a realization. D. T. Suzuki sums up this stance succinctly: "we are all finite, we cannot live out of time and space . . . salvation must be sought in the finite itself . . . if you seek the transcendental, that will cut you off from this world of relativity, which is the same thing as annihilation of yourself" (14).</p></li><li><p>Blake consistently presents "self-annihilation" an ethical imperative that permits a fundamental re-visioning of nature.&#160; However, as Kevin Hutchings points out, such "annihilation" is <i>not</i> synonymous with the human subject's complete loss of identity due to its absorption into nature as an "outside," as may be erroneously inferred from Lussier's notion of "undifferentiated existence." On the contrary, in Blake's schema, the atomistic Cartesian subject is "annihilated" not by being absorbed into nature, but instead is transformed via a radical expansion outward so that it comes to be perceived as encompassing both humanity and nature within a higher "Human" identity. I would argue that what could be termed Blake's monistic "higher humanism" is something that distinguishes his art from both Zen Buddhist thought and from deep ecology. However, Blake's emphasis on phenomenological experience as a gateway to realizing this higher state of unity is something that also connects his thought with these approaches, as scholars such as John G. Rudy have noted. In poems such as <i>Milton</i>, self-annihilation is not merely arrived at via abstract contemplation, but is experienced as an ecstatic, embodied expansion of the self outward in moments of intense inspiration. What critic Michel Haar says of Rilke's attempt to explore the "'unheard of center' or 'pure space' of the heart of the world that is no longer subject or object" (130) seems equally descriptive of Blake's project. Haar asserts that when Rilke says "The birds fly through us" he "does not mean our consciousness represents the flight of the birds; not only do we experience their very flight in our body, but it happens through our body in a sense that is not simply a matter of perception but a fit of passion, of an ecstatic outburst , of 'sympathy,' of a fluttering of wings that quivers through and beyond us in a space that gathers and envelops us" (Haar 126).&#160; Such ecstatic "sympathy" enables Blake to experience (via his imagination) the being of other animals and to assert that they have the ability to "signify" through and beyond the scope of language. A vivid instance of this occurs in <i>Milton</i>'s famous lark song passage:</p><blockquote>The Lark sitting upon his earthly bed: just as the morn<br/>
Appears;&#160;listens silent; then springing from the waving Corn-field! loud<br/>
He leads the Choir of Day! trill, trill, trill, trill,<br/>
Mounting upon the wings of light into the Great Expanse:<br/>
Reechoing against the lovely blue &amp; shining heavenly Shell.<br/>
His little throat labours with inspiration; everyfeather<br/>
On throat &amp; breast &amp; wings vibrates with the effluence Divine<br/>
All Nature listens silent to him &amp; the awful Sun<br/>
Stands still upon the Mountain looking on this little Bird<br/>
With eyes of soft humility, &amp; wonder love &amp; awe (II, 31:29-38)</blockquote><p>Inspired, the lark's song moves its whole being, makes it quake with "Divine effluence"; its whole body "vibrates" with inspiration, just as the poem resonates with a sound but half its own. The poet, like the bird, "labours" to give voice to this "ecstatic outburst" whereby the reader may experience something of the bird's vibrant trace: "the bird flies through us" when our bodies resonate with the text, or when we experience the lark's song first hand. The lark signifies as an emergent phenomenon at the juncture of bird, text, song and consciousness, so that its voice becomes indistinguishable from the poet's. Such identification, whereby the bird is no longer just a bird, nor the text just a vehicle for representation, would be quite impossible from a dualistic perspective. Similarly, Rudy interprets the lines "How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,/ Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five" in Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" as "draw[ing] the reader meditatively into the prior oneness of text and bird, of text and world, as the emergent base of all reading" (102). Rudy notes that the question "<i>How do you arrive at</i> the knowledge of immensity suggested in the phrase 'immense world of delight'" meditatively leads the reader towards the insight that "the bird is not simply a representation of delight. It <i>is</i> the realm of delight itself, requiring not simply knowledge <i>about</i> but knowledge <i>as</i> that which is under the pen" (104). What we see in Blake's poetics that is common to both Zen and deep ecology is, therefore, an emphasis on action as a form of knowledge that compliments discourse, "a shift from saying to doing" (100).</p></li><li><p>And yet, is Blake's romantic identification enough to provide us with a blueprint for subjectivity that moves beyond anthropocentrism to cultivate an ethos of alterity? &#160;Given Blake's monistic position, his belief that all things are part of a higher Human (with a capital H) identity, one might question in what sense his poetry permits the thinking nature's alterity as true "otherness." It seems to me that Blake's thought is incompatible with deep ecology's desire to recognize nature's "inherent value" if by this we mean the ability to acknowledge nature's worth beyond any human "awareness, interest or appreciation" of it. Indeed, Blake's thinking does not break with humanism's tendency to see in man "the measure of all things"&#8212;why else would his figure of ultimate unification (Albion) bear a human form?&#160; From an ecological perspective, Blake's monistic equation of nature with Human imagination poses potential difficulties. For example, what about the need to protect species or landscapes with which we humans have difficulty identifying (perhaps why there aren't more "save the leech or swamp" campaigns)?&#160; Likewise, as aforementioned, too much human identification with a species can also lead to destructive ecological practices. Still more problematic is the potential to justify continuing radical alteration of the environment based on the principle of identity. In <i>The Machine in the Garden</i>, Leo Marx explores how the pastoral ideal guiding western cultivation of so-called "barren" wilderness is underwritten by the notion that all human arts (including technology) are a product of nature, that nature evolved our tool wielding species to permit its own transformation. In the humanities, the equivalent of this thinking is reflected in assertions that without art, nature would not signify&#8212;in Heideggerian terms, that nature requires the "clearings" of human language so that the "truth" of its being may shine forth. The common theme here is, to quote Blake, "where man is not, nature is barren." Yet deep ecology seeks to balance "wide identification" with an ability to recognize that nature (even without humans) constitutes a richly diverse panorama of life, much of which evolved long before humans arrived on the scene. Is there a way to balance identification with an acknowledgment that this domain has inherent value, a right to exist apart from us?&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;</p></li><li><p>In order to create room for thinking the truth of inherent value, deep ecology draws upon both post-Romantic Western thought and insights from Eastern philosophy, most notably from the late work of philosopher Martin Heidegger and from Zen Buddhism. As Bill Devall and George Sessions note in <i>Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered</i>, Heidegger "made three contributions to the deep, long-range ecology literature," namely: his critique of Western philosophy's development after Plato (which "paved the way for the technocratic mentality that espouses domination over Nature"), his characterization of Thinking as something "closer to the Taoist process of contemplation than to Western analytical thinking," and finally, an ethos that urges modern culture to develop ways of "dwell[ing] authentically on this Earth" via increased alertness to one's bioregion and to natural processes (98). Despite these potentially useful ideas, however, it must be acknowledged that Heidegger not only remains a controversial figure due to his allegiances with Nazi politics, but also a problematic thinker even from an ecological perspective. For example, in <i>Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question</i>, Jacques Derrida notes that Heidegger's characterization of animals as "world poor" in comparison to human beings constitutes a "discourse on privation [that] cannot avoid a certain anthropocentric or even humanist teleology" (55). In "Eating Well," Derrida even claims that Heidegger's theory of animal privation belies a "sacrificial structure" (113) that underwrites western culture's putting to death (in a non-criminal manner) of not only animals but also groups of de-humanized people. While I do not endorse Derrida's conclusion that Heidegger's desire to deny humanity's kinship with animals implies that human beings do not "have a responsibility to the living in general" (112), it is important to acknowledge potentially destructive components in Heidegger's thinking which tend to essentialize both human and animal identity alike. Philosophers sympathetic to deep ecology would do well to interrogate such flaws in Heidegger's critique of humanism, as Michael Zimmerman has in recent years.</p></li><li><p>Nevertheless, in spite of the many shortcomings in Heidegger's work (and life), his thought does inaugurate, in a unique manner, a way towards thinking the underlying complimentarity of "wide identification" and "inherent value" which is critical to the deep ecological platform. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on the evolving relationship of "poiesis" to physis in Heidegger's work as an indication that nature's "presence" or truth may not ultimately require human artifice to be revealed.&#160; I will focus on "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935) and "The Thing" (1950) as texts that reflect, in Zimmerman's words, a turning away from an earlier anthropocentrism in Heidegger's thought when the philosopher concluded that "he could no longer conceive of being in terms of human understanding, but instead had to conceive of human understanding as an aspect of being itself" ("Heidegger" 247). That is, Heidegger's late philosophy regarding the mutually "appropriating mirror-play" ("The Thing" 179) of the fourfold (earth, sky, mortals and the divine) suggests that the "physis" (self-revealing event) of natural entities constitutes a form of value ("intrinsic value") that cannot be reduced to the clearings afforded by western poiesis (human facilitated modes of revealing), such as art and technology. Heidegger's eventual turn away from formal philosophy is sometimes attributed to his interest in poets writing in the Romantic tradition, such as H&#246;lderlin and Rilke. Certainly in essays like "As When On a Holiday&#8230;" (1939) we can see the influence of romantic identification with nature at work. Here, Heidegger develops his hermeneutics of resonance, whereby the poet responds to the "call" of nature by creating linguistic "clearings" through which the truth of its "holy chaos" (82) can be simultaneously revealed and concealed, or perhaps more to the point, <i>revealed in its concealment</i>. But beyond the identification that permits the poet to respond to nature's sublimity, there is also a play in this essay between nature's presence and absence, a revealing and concealing flux that is not evident (or possible) in Blake's monistic ethos. Is there another tradition that Heidegger brings into play that enables insight into an irreducible nothingness that is ever at work in nature's revealing?&#160; Many scholars have pointed to the influence of Eastern thought&#8212;and particularly Buddhism and Taoism&#8212;on the development of Heidegger's late work. The philosopher was already referencing Eastern thought in his lectures during the 1930's, worked with a Chinese scholar to translate Lao-tzu in 1946, and, upon reading D.T. Suzuki's <i>Zen Buddhism</i> in the 1950's, remarked "[i]f I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings" (quoted in Suzuki&#160; xi). As Zimmerman asserts in "Heidegger, Buddhism and deep ecology," there is much to suggest that Zen thinking enabled Heidegger's late philosophy of dwelling to go beyond anthropocentric identification in order to explore how all things (man-made and natural entities) are at once absent and present, gathering the world into presence by virtue of their emptiness.</p></li><li><p>This shift is perhaps most evident in the different treatment of the relationship between art and nature in "The Origin of the Work of Art"(1935) and in "The Thing"(1950). In the "Origin" essay, Heidegger discusses the way a Greek temple "accomplishes" (175) the strife between earth and world necessary for the revealing of truth, and in doing so "acquire[s] the shape of destiny for human being" (167). That is, the temple both embodies occidental culture's pitting of human history (world) against an earth that is conceived of as being "ahistorical," and brings these domains into an antagonistic "belonging to one another"(174). Natural entities require the temple's work for their "truth" to come into presence, and historical world requires the earth as a foundation that grounds its unfolding destiny. Through a series of violent cuts, the temple's diff&#233;rance permits an otherwise invisible earth to become visible:</p><blockquote>Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging<br/>
above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence . . .<br/>
The temple's firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air . . .<br/>
Tree, grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their<br/>
distinctive shapes and thus appear as what they are. The Greeks early called<br/>
this emerging and rising in itself and in all things <i>physis</i>. (167-68)</blockquote><p>What is curious about the description of the temple's poiesis&#8212;its bringing into presence of nature&#8212;is the way in which the temple's "world" has usurped the original meaning of physis, which is an "emerging and rising <i>in itself</i>" [my emphasis]. That is, natural phenomena only become "visible" via the temple's enframing; by implication, earthly things cannot manifest themselves as what they truly are without the presence of human poiesis (which originally included both art and technology as forms of techn&#275;). The earth's reliance upon human enframing for its truth to appear is even more pronounced in the world of modern (as opposed to ancient) art. In his famous discussion of Van Gogh's painting of peasant shoes, Heidegger analyzes the way in which the painting reveals the truth of the shoes as equipment, which in turn reflects the truth of the peasant's "world" and, only indirectly, the earth's truth as part of the peasant's world. Indeed, the earth's status in the world revealed through this relatively modern, representational work of art is arguably even more removed than what we see in the Greek temple. This is because "earth" in the painting is subject to many layers of mediation: its traces are only indirectly apparent by considering signs of wear upon the shoes, the earth's significance for the (hypothetical) peasant woman who owns the shoes, the artist Van Gogh's interpretation of the peasant's world, the viewer's interpretation of Van Gogh's interpretations. On the one hand, Heidegger tells us that "in the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field" (159). On the other hand, we are told that the shoes are a completely de-contextualized aesthetic object: "there is nothing surrounding this pair of peasant shoes in or to which they might belong&#8212;only an undefined space.&#160; There are not even clods of soil from the field or the field-path sticking to them, which would at least hint at their use." The question therefore arises as to how the earth can be at once present <i>and</i> absent in modern representational art; a paradox that can only be resolved by seeing the earth's "presence" as being entirely contingent upon the viewer's apprehension of its role in the peasant's experience of world: "on the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles stretches the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls." The earth's physis as a mode of self-revealing is, therefore, particularly inaccessible within the alethias (clearings) afforded by Van Gogh's painting. Although a trace of the earth's materiality is evident in the ancient temple's marble and in the natural environment which surrounds it, nature's physis is completely subsumed in the painting by the shoes' utility, the peasant woman's world, and the decontextualized nature of the art object itself.</p></li><li><p>By 1954, however, physis makes a remarkable comeback in "The Question Concerning Technology." There, Heidegger claims that not only art, but physis itself is a form of poiesis ("bringing forth"): "physis is indeed poi&#275;sis in the highest sense," as evident in the "bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself"(10). Rather than pitting technology's poiesis against earth's physis in an effort to alter the latter, Heidegger suggests that technology should ideally allow the earth's own presence to "be" instead of transforming nature into a gigantic "standing reserve"(17) of energy. What can account for the dramatic shift in physis's status in this late work? I believe a careful study of "The Thing," a text written four years before "The Question Concerning Technology," suggests that concepts derived from Eastern traditions may well have influenced this change in Heidegger's thought. In this text, there is an attempt to re-think the value of physis, of learning to respect what is inherent in nature&#8212;what Zen philosophy might refer to as nature's "suchness." Such thinking would see humanity's identification with nature as a first (not final) step towards granting natural entities the right to "just be" (inherent value). Paradoxically, deep identification entails granting non-human things a certain <i>distance</i> from humanity's modes of being, while also acknowledging that all things are "appropriated" within the fourfold "thinging" of earth, sky, mortals, and the divine. The former creates a space for thinking how the physis of natural entities constitutes a mode of poiesis, while the latter (in a suggestive parallel with Buddhist thought) implies that all things have "presence" by virtue of an underlying absence (emptiness).</p></li><li><p>As in "The Question Concerning Technology" essay, "The Thing" begins with a discussion of the many ways in which contemporary technology appears to have virtually eliminated "distances in time and space" (165). That is, circa 1950, air travel, telecommunications, film, and other technologies seem to have "abolish[ed] every possibility" of temporal or spatial "remoteness" as great distances can be overcome with a speed that is historically unprecedented (an abolition that is even more pronounced in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century internet era). Yet, Heidegger argues that in spite of this "conquest of distances" there is a "terrifying" sense in which we remain remote from the nature of things: "the nearness of things remains absent" (166). In the course of the essay, it becomes clear that "things" include both man-made and natural entities, the phenomena that constitute "being" as a whole. Heidegger suggests that the "thingness of things" (167) remains remote from us as long as we conceive of things as <i>objects</i>:&#160; "the thingly character of the thing does not consist in its being a represented object, nor can it be defined in any way in terms of objectness, the over-againstness, of the object." That is, the essence of thing-ness does not appear in "objective" scientific accounts of an entity's physical composition, or in modes of enframing which equate things merely with their utility as man-made products. Nor do we gain insight into the nature of things by dividing the world between "objects" represented within the subject's consciousness versus things-in-themselves (Kant's account): "'Thing-in-itself,' thought in a rigorously Kantian way, means an object that is no object for us, because it is supposed to stand, stay put, without a possible before: for the human representational act that encounters it" (177). Instead of seeing things as static objects that are "represented" within human consciousness, Heidegger proposes that we contemplate all things as instances of "gathering"&#8212;as clearings that enable a bringing together of four modes of being&#8212;earth, sky, mortals (human beings), and the divine&#8212;that mutually appropriate (179) each other. A thing's thing-ness therefore consists in its "bringing near" (178) the fourfold in a way that "sets each of the four free into its own, [yet] binds these free ones into the simplicity of their essential being toward one another" (179). For example, a jug "things" insofar as it holds the "gift" of wine, and thereby gathers the sky's water, the earth's grape, humanity's production of wine, and the presence of gods when wine is used in religious ceremonies (libation). Such gatherings constitute the thingness of things, something not only true of the products of human poiesis, but also of the physis of natural entities:</p><blockquote>Inconspicuously compliant is the thing: the jug and the bench, the footbridge and the plow. But tree and pond, too, brook and hill, are things, each in its own way. Things, each thinging from time to time in its own way, are heron and roe, deer horse and bull. Things, each thinging and each staying in its own way, are mirror and clasp, book and picture, crown and cross. (182)</blockquote><p>Two things are striking regarding this penultimate passage in "The Thing." First, there is an acknowledgement here that poiesis is not the only means whereby things come into "presence"; rather, all things do this insofar as they gather the fourfold, "each in [their] own way." A tree, for example, can also be said to "gather" the fourfold insofar as it is nourished by the earth's soil, and the sky's light can be affected by human care and perceived as a symbol of divine creation. Unlike what we see in the "Origin of Art" essay, Heidegger insists here that things do not appear as things "<i>by means</i><i>of</i> human making," but neither, he insists, do they appear "without the vigilance of mortals" (181). From a human perspective, things do not appear in their thing-ness unless we reconsider what it means to "dwell" more responsively in a world where we are always already part of a larger "dance of appropria[tion]" (180) over which we cannot exert ultimate control.&#160; In acknowledging that all things gather the world, "each in [their] own way," Heidegger's thought inaugurates a way towards understanding natural entities' "inherent value" and challenges human beings to find ways to honor this value in their own poiesis (technological or artistic clearings).</p></li><li><p>How did Heidegger arrive at such a different perspective on the relationship between physis and poeisis in his later work?&#160; Scholars such as Reinhard May and Michael Zimmerman have suggested that Heidegger's encounters with Eastern thought&#8212;particularly his interest in Buddhism and Taoism&#8212;may well have influenced this shift. A crucial step toward acknowledging humanity's appropriation within the fourfold lies in recognizing a deeper relationship between emptiness and form than has traditionally been available in post-Platonic Western philosophy&#8212;a relationship convincingly elaborated within Eastern traditions. As Zimmerman argues, both Heidegger and Mahayana Buddhism acknowledge "humans can learn to 'let things be' only by gaining insight into the nothingness that pervades all things" ("Heidegger" 240). In Mahayana Buddhism, nothingness connotes the "emptiness" and impermanence of all things, yet is not synonymous with formless, chaotic negativity. Rather, the Sanksrit word for nothingness, "sunyata," is derived from a term meaning "to swell" (quoted in "Heidegger"&#160; 252), suggesting that emptiness can be conceived of&#160; as a "clearing" or openness that constitutes a generative space in which things appear. It is no accident that Heidegger chooses a jug as the focus of his discussion in "The Thing." A jug is an ideal focus for critiquing of our understanding of things as solid, discreet objects, rather than "clearings" which gather the world.&#160; The jug's "thing-ness" is not to be understood as synonymous with its material composition, but is instead suggested by its "holding" (or gathering) nature:</p><blockquote>When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel's holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel . . . [t]he vessel's thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds. (169)</blockquote><p>In contrast to the Greek temple in the "Origin" essay, whose columns make the air visible, it is the <i>emptiness</i> of the jug, not its form, that constitutes its thingness. In Taoist fashion, the jug is a clearing through which the fourfold comes to presence, as it gathers together the earth's soil and the sky's rain in wine that mortals pour in libation to the gods. Indeed, as Reinhard May illustrates in <i>Heidegger's Hidden Sources</i>, "The Thing's" discussion of the jug remarkably parallels Chapt. 11 of Lao Tzu's exploration of how "[t]he work of pitchers consists in their nothingness" (30). Similarly, Zimmerman discusses suggestive parallels between Heidegger's characterization of the fourfold's mutually appropriating "mirror-play" and insight regarding the universe's luminosity in Mahayana Buddhism. In the most famous expression of this insight, the universe is conceived as the jewel net of the god Indra.&#160; All things are analogous to "perfect gems" within this net (or network), and their reflective light is simultaneously produced by all the gems collectively, "no one of which stands in a 'superior' or 'causal' relation to the others" ("Heidegger" 253). Zimmerman argues that "Heidegger's account of the dance of earth and sky, gods and mortals, the dance in which things manifest themselves in the event of mutual appropriation, bears remarkable similarities to the Buddhist account of the moment-by-moment coproduction of self-luminous phenomena" (257).&#160;&#160;</p></li><li><p>Critics steeped within a Western tradition that posits the human individual's dignity and "inherent value" might find the suggestion that all things (human and otherwise) are "empty" has troubling implications if applied to political subjectivity, fearing that an emptying of selves is often a prerequisite of totalitarian political regimes or can lead to too intense an identification with the "objective" domain. For example, Brian Victoria's <i>Zen War Stories</i> makes a compelling case for a link between the Zen concept of "selflessness" and Japanese militarism during World War II, and Karla Poewe's <i>New Religions and the Nazis</i> similarly links the German Faith movement, militarism and Indo-Aryan religious doctrine, particularly Jakob Hauer's interpretation of Hindu texts such as the <i>Bhagavad Gita</i>.&#160; Poewe claims that Hauer's efforts to forge a new Indo-Aryan religion with a fatalistic warrior code "anticipated justification of the deeds committed by the Nazi regime" (79). Such work, as with critiques of radical elements within the deep ecology movement, usefully analyzes potential effects of state-sanctioned religious ideology, instead of maintaining that religious discourse necessarily "transcends" politics. As convincing as such studies are as explorations of how Eastern thought has been appropriated by totalitarian regimes, it is problematic to conclude that Buddhist and/or Hindu thought is <i>essentially</i> nationalistic and/or totalitarian. To draw such a conclusion is to not only distort what Hirata Seik&#333; describes as "the absolute rejection of war in ancient Indian Buddhism" (4), but also to deny that any set of ideas is subject to variable interpretation or, more rigorously, (re-) construction over time.&#160; As is well known, when Chinese scholars translated Indian Hinayanan and Mahayanan texts, they interpreted Buddhism within the framework of existing Taoist thought, resulting in "Cha'an" Buddhism; likewise, Japanese monks reinterpreted these texts to form Zen Buddhism. Any western interpreter of Buddhism brings to the table certain cultural and/or ideological lenses through which he or she constructs interpretations of this thought. Concepts such as "emptiness" are therefore not only subject to ideological appropriation (in both a positive and negative sense), but also to unintended distortion. As John Rudy and other interpreters of Zen Buddhism have pointed out, a western, dualistic tradition that divides the world between subjects and objects can contribute to misinterpretation of the concept of emptiness. In <i>Romanticism and Zen Buddhism</i>, Rudy points out that:</p><blockquote>For Zen Buddhists, engaging [a] spiritual ground [inclusive yet prior to subject-object dualities] follows patterns of meditative emptying by which individuals relinquish the compulsion either to assert independence through radical emphases on difference or to establish unity through variant modes of bridged togetherness. The result is neither subjective nor objective. It is, rather, an opening process that reveals how each thing in nature is both an autonomous unit of codependent activity and a holistic manifestation of ultimate reality. (xiii)</blockquote><p>Rather than underwriting identification with "objective" or state-sanctioned structures (totalitarian or otherwise), emptiness as Rudy interprets it suggests an alternative to both subjective individualism and objective obedience to collectives. Indeed, it is such alternatives to dualistic accounts of human subjectivity vis-&#224;-vis the rest of the living world that appealed not only to Heidegger in the later stages of his philosophy, but also continues to appeal to deep ecologists. As "The Thing" makes clear, insight into the self's "appropriation" within the world's mirror play does <i>not</i> entail a collapsing of any one dimension of the fourfold into the others.&#160; Human beings still retain a unique manner of "gathering" the world in relation to other beings: "men alone, as mortals, by dwelling attain to the world as world" (182)&#8212;that is, human beings alone can self-consciously choose the mode of their dwelling and experience the world as one of many possible worlds. Nonetheless, other non-human beings also participate in the fourfold, "each in its own way," and this diversity implies the inherent value of each unique mode of gathering. The metaphor of "mirror-play" enables Heidegger to suggest a deep identification between human and non-human actors in the "dance" of creation, yet this mirroring never stabilizes into a form of monistic holism. I would suggest that this is because, unlike his Romantic predecessors such as William Blake, Heidegger ultimately resists equating "nature" with a higher Human identity, such as the Imagination. Instead, the philosopher, like deep ecologists influenced by his thought, challenges us to think of identification and inherent worth as a productive "coincidence of opposites" (in Dennis McCort's parlance), the kind of paradoxical truth embraced by Buddhist and Toaist traditions. If we re-conceive the identity of all things as at once unique (having inherent value) and empty (inescapably appropriated by other beings), a truly non-anthropocentric understanding of nature becomes possible. Paradoxically, only by learning to "identify" with the emptiness of all things while retaining a sense of our distinctive perspective may we eventually find it in ourselves to allow mountains to be mountains and waters to be waters.<br/></p></li></ol></div>
&#160;
<div class="notesWorks"><br/>
<h4>Works Cited</h4>
<p class="hang">Blake, William. <i>The Complete Poetry &amp; Prose of William Blake</i>. Ed. David V. Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1988.</p><p class="hang">Derrida, Jacques. "'Eating Well,' or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida." Trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell. <i>Who</i><i>Comes After the Subject?</i>&#160;Ed. Eduardo Cadava et al. New York: Routledge,&#160;1991.</p><p class="hang">---.&#160;<i>Of Spirit:&#160;Heidegger and the Question</i>. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: U of Chicago Press,&#160; 1989.</p><p class="hang">Devall, Bill and George Sessions. <i>Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered</i>. Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith,&#160;1985.</p><p class="hang">Ferry, Luc. <i>The New Ecological Order</i>. Trans. Carol Volk. Chicago: U of Chicago Press,&#160;1995.</p><p class="hang">Glasser, Harold.&#160;"Demystifying the Critiques of Deep Ecology." <i>Environmental</i><i>Philosophy:&#160; From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology</i>. 2nd Ed. New Jersey: &#160;Prentice Hall,&#160;1998. 212-226.</p><p class="hang">Haar, Michel. <i>The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of the History</i><i>of Being</i>. Trans. Reginald Lilly. Bloomington: IU Press,&#160;1993.</p><p class="hang">Heidegger, Martin. "As When On a Holiday. . . ." <i>Elucidations of H&#246;lderlin's Poetry</i>. Trans. Keith Hoeller. New York: Humanity Books,&#160; 2000.&#160;&#160;</p><p class="hang">---.&#160;"The Origin of the Work of Art." <i>Basic Writings</i>. Ed. David Farell Krell. San Francisco: Harper, 1993. 139-212. 67-99.</p><p class="hang">---. "The Question Concerning Technology." <i>The Question Concerning Technology and</i><i>Other Essays</i>. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper &amp; Row,&#160;1977. 3-35.</p><p class="hang">---.&#160;"The Thing." <i>Poetry, Language, Thought</i>. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper, 1971. 165-186.</p><p class="hang">Hutchings, Kevin. <i>Imagining Nature: Blake's Environmental Poetics</i>. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP,&#160;2002.</p><p class="hang">Lussier, Mark. "Blake's Deep Ecology, or the Ethos of Otherness." <i>Romantic Dynamics: The</i><i>Poetics of Physicality</i>. New York: St. Martin's,&#160;2000. 47-63.</p><p class="hang">Marx, Leo. <i>The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in</i><i>America</i>. New York: Oxford UP,&#160;1964.</p><p class="hang">May, Reinhard. <i>Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian influences on his work</i>. Trans. Graham Parkes. New York: Routledge,&#160; 1996.</p><p class="hang">McCort, Dennis. <i>Going beyond the Pairs: The Coincidence of Opposites in German</i><i>Romanticism, Zen and Deconstruction</i>. Albany: SUNY Press,&#160; 2001.</p><p class="hang">McKibben, Bill. <i>The End of Nature</i>. New York:&#160;Doubleday,&#160;1999.</p><p class="hang">Naess, Arne. "The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects." <i>Environmental Philosophy</i>. 2nd Ed. 193-211.</p><p class="hang">Poewe, Karla. <i>New Religions and the Nazis</i>. London: Routledge,&#160;2006.</p><p class="hang">Rudy, John G. <i>Romanticism and Zen Buddhism</i>. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004.</p><p class="hang">Seik&#333;, Hirata. "Zen Buddhist Attitudes to War." Trans. Thomas Kirchner. <i>Rude Awakenings:</i><i>Zen, the Kyoto School, &amp; the Question of Nationalism</i>. Eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,&#160;1994.</p><p class="hang">Serres, Michel. <i>The Natural Contract</i>. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press,&#160;1998.</p><p class="hang">Sheng-yu Lai, Robert. "Blake and Zen Buddhism: A Study of the Uses of Orthodox Religion." <i>Tamkang Review</i>&#160;18.4 (1987): 351-369.</p><p class="hang">Suzuki, D.T. <i>Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D. T. Suzuki</i>. Ed. William Barrett. New York:&#160;Doubleday,&#160;1996.</p><p class="hang">Victoria, Brian Daizen. <i>Zen War Stories</i>. New York: Routledge Curzon,&#160;2003.</p><p class="hang">Wolfe, Cary. "Old Orders for New: Ecology, Animal Rights and the Poverty of Humanism." <i>Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species</i>, <i>and Posthumanist Theory</i>. Chicago: U of Chicago Press,&#160;2003. 21-43.</p><p class="hang">Zimmerman, Michael.&#160; "Ecofascism: An Enduring Temptation." <i>Environmental Philosophy:</i><i>From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology</i>. 4th ed. New Jersey:&#160; Prentice Hall,&#160; 1998. 390-408.</p><p class="hang">---.&#160;"Heidegger, Buddhism and Deep Ecology." <i>The Cambridge Companion to</i><i>Heidegger</i>.&#160;Ed. Charles Guignon. New York: Cambridge UP,&#160;1993. 240-269.<br/><br/></p></div>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/economides-louise">Economides, Louise</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/664" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Deep Ecology</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/665" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Buddhism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/666" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">phenomenology</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/heidegger" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Heidegger</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/668" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">ecocriticism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/669" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">humanism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/670" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">eco-fascism</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-blake" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Blake</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/michel-serres" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michel Serres</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/cary-wolfe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Cary Wolfe</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jacques-derrida" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jacques Derrida</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/martin-heidegger" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Martin Heidegger</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/john-g-rudy-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John G. Rudy</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/michael-zimmerman" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michael Zimmerman</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/mark-lussier-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mark Lussier</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/kevin-hutchings-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kevin Hutchings</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/bill-mckibben" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bill McKibben</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/louise-economides" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Louise Economides</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/jerusalem" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jerusalem</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/montana" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Montana</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-region-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Region:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/region/far-east" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Far East</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:28:56 +0000rc-admin16349 at http://www.rc.umd.edu